Are there books on your shelves you know you'll never read again, taking up room for those new books yet to arrive? Audiotapes of books hanging around the car? Here's something the book-lover can do to help out others, in the spirit of the season that's in it. The Oxfam Shop in Parliament Street, Dublin, is a branch that sells only books, so you can be sure that the profits from any volumes you bring in are going to charity.
Sometimes people are too ill to read, but still love to hear a story. Hospices, such as St Francis's in Station Road, Raheny, Dublin 5, are grateful to receive audio-books, as they are currently planning reading groups, using audio-books, for some of their patients. Hear, hear for a great idea.
The euro, the euro. We've all heard about "rounding up" and "rounding down" and, in the world of prizes, such as the Impac, the prize money was rounded down quite a bit, from £100,000 to €100,000. Listowel Writers' Week has written to Sadbh to say that its Kerry Ingredients Irish Fiction Award has been rounded up very nicely from £5,000 to €10,000. While we still have punts on our minds, that's about £2,500 extra. The judges for 2002 will be novelist Eugene McCabe and Eileen Battersby, literary correspondent of this paper.
Cl≤ Iar-Chonnachta, the Irish- language Connemara-based publisher, is looking for entries for its literary competition from novelists or playwrights in the Irish language. The closing date has been extended to the end of December. Applicants should send three copies of manuscripts, along with an entry fee of £20, to Cl≤ Iar-Chonnachta, Indreabhβn, Conamara, Co na Gaillimhe. The prize is £5,000 and publication of the winning entry. Last year's winner was Pβdraig ╙ Siadhail, for his collection of stories, Na Seacht gCineβl Meisce.
The winner of this year's Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry is Ann Leahy, for her collection, Teasing Roots From the Stem of a Geranium. Leahy, who lives in Dublin, has yet to publish a collection, but several individual poems have already won prizes or been published - and eight poems have been translated into Russian.
It's the time of year when excess is indulged and giving up the things deemed bad for you is put on hold until, well, next year. It may seem a tad early to be talking about New Year's resolutions, but this column won't be appearing again until 2002 so, if you like, you could cut it out and keep it to read in a fortnight.
A wee book by Irish Times journalist Conor Goodman, The Smoker's Handbook: Survival Guide for a Dying Breed, just published by New Island, could be the one to get smokers meditating on their weedy ways. Goodman, a "committed quitter" as he explained in last week's Weekend (in other words, still puffing away despite efforts to the contrary) has written a book mercifully free of any patronising cant about attempting to stop smoking.
The book is filled with anecdotes about those who have puffed away in their time. Sadbh was interested to hear that tales she had long taken for granted about Sir Walter Raleigh are, in fact, just yarns. Thus, the man wasn't the first to take tobacco to England and neither did he lay his cloak across a puddle for Elizabeth I. Mind you, that last one was always a daft tale: what protection was a cloth cloak going to be anyway?
However, the tale that Goodman does include as true is wilder by far than any of the others. Raleigh was a big smoker, and made the habit popular by example. His doom, though, was not to die of lung cancer but to be beheaded by order of James I: "Up to the moment of the chop, Raleigh refused to take his pipe from his mouth. It was duly removed, but not before his head." Ouch.
That's how hard it is to quit. Good luck with those resolutions, and Happy Christmas everyone!