It's not really surprising, though remarkable all the same, that Maeve Binchy features eight times in the just-published Eason list of Top 100 bestselling Irish books of the past fifty years - indeed, seven times in the Top Twenty.
Nor is it surprising that Roddy Doyle is represented by four books and Darina Allen by three - we all know how popular these writers are with the general reading public.
But I was struck by the inclusion of four titles by Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney and three by Brian Friel, if only because in Britain the Waterstone's list of 100 Books of the Century found no room for any poetry or drama. So it must be true that we Irish do read more adventurously than our neighbours across the water.
Of course lists like this, which are essentially canny marketing ploys by the bookstores, don't really tell us anything important we didn't already know, though the inclusion of four Walter Macken novels in Eason's Top 100 wasn't to be expected (certainly not in the placement they're given: at 24, 25, 26 and 27), nor was the inclusion of The Vicar of Wakefield and Castle Rackrent among the separate list of nine Irish "classics" most loved by readers.
Irish publishers, however, will be cheered - thirty-nine of the books were published here: eight by the O'Brien Press, seven by Gill & Macmillan, five by Wolfhound, four by Poolbeg, three each by Brandon and Mercier, two each by Appletree, New Island and Town House, and one each by Anvil, Goldsmith and Talbot.
Given that it's by a Nobel laureate, I assumed I was to blame when I couldn't make any headway with Derek Walcott's epic poem, Omeros, but I find myself in extremely good company, because Michael Longley also thinks it "a yawn, pretty boring".
I learn this from an interview in the just-published fourth issue of Metre, the magazine of international poetry edited by Justin Quinn and David Wheatley. Talking to Oxford research student Sarah Broom, the Belfast poet also speaks frankly about the fallow creative period he endured in the 1980s:
"I did try to write poems, but they weren't any good. And - well, I'd stopped enjoying life. It was partly because of my job, in which I was increasingly unhappy. The middle stretch, as MacNeice calls it - the middle stretch is bad for poets. Poems tend to be written by young and old people. At least on the male side - it's more complicated again on the female side. A lot of women start to write when they've brought up their children."
The job was with the Northern Ireland Arts Council: "I did it for twenty years. I felt very privileged to work with artists and I enjoyed that part of it very much, but it was the bureaucracy, the office politics that got me down."
At the same time, he was getting "increasingly paranoid and depressive . . . I hate to sound like a women's magazine, but it was a mid-life crisis, and I thought I was finished."
All's well that ends well, though: "It was an enormous release and happiness when towards the end of my forties and beginning of my fifties I started to write again."
That's just one subject touched on in a wide-ranging and absorbing interview. The magazine also contains fifteen poems by this distinguished poet.
FIRST novels by two Irish writers were launched in Dublin this week.
A reception in Waterstone's on Tuesday night marked the publication of Robert Cremins's A Sort of Homecoming, described by its publisher, Sceptre, as "a novel of roomkeepers and ravers, semtex and sensibility", whatever that means. The author, a 30-year-old Dubliner, was educated in Trinity College and the University of East Anglia (under the tutelage of Malcolm Bradbury) and now enjoys what he describes as "a suburban life" with his wife and son in Houston, Texas, where he teaches.
Darach MacDonald's novel, The Sons of Levi, published by Drumlin Press and launched (also on Tuesday evening) in the Irish Writers' Centre, focuses on a particular family to illustrate the plight of the 70,000 Ulster Protestants who found themselves stranded in the Irish Free State when the province was partitioned in 1921.
The Clones-born author, who has worked as a journalist in Dublin and Toronto, originally conceived the novel as a television screenplay but on his return last year from Canada he reimagined it in prose. His aim, he says, was "to explore the rich heritage of a people who believe fervently that they are ignored" and he sees in their story "a lesson for our times".
The previous evening in Waterstone's, Maeve Binchy, Pauline McLynn and Joseph O'Connor gave short readings to convey the spirit of a new RTE Radio One summer series that begins next week.
Entitled "Reading in the Shade" and running at 2.45 each afternoon from Monday to Friday, this will feature a different book every week, Joseph O'Connor starting the proceedings next Monday by reading from The Secret World of the Irish Male (No. 87 in the above-mentioned Eason list).
In succeeding weeks, Patrick McCabe will read from The Butcher Boy (Eason's 76th), Maeve Binchy from Evening Class (Eason's 3rd), Seamus Deane from Reading in the Dark (Eason's 36th), Pauline McLynn from Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked into Doors ( Eason's 19th), Nuala O'Faolain from Are You Somebody? (Eason's 70th), Eamon Kelly from The Journeyman, Clare Boylan from Room for a Single Lady, Bernard MacLaverty from Grace Notes and Deirdre Purcell from Love Like Hate Adore.
After that, alas, the summer will be just about over.