Short vignettes of small town life in Ireland. Very sweet.

This short collection of stories is a feel good reminiscing of growing up in the Irish countryside. Alice Taylor recalls her childhood, her marriage, her neighbors, her children, and her faith in often times hilarious and insightful clarity and the reader is stuck wishing that they too lived in a quaint little village in Ireland. At least that's how I felt. When I finished listening to the audiobook, I wanted to pack up my suitcase and head over. Such a serene sounding life, beautiful and filled with wonder. Listening to the audiobook was also nice because the narrator had such a wonderful voice (anyone with an Irish accent has a nice voice, but that's beside the point).

This is a must read or listen for anyone obsessed with the Irish countryside or small village life. It's a quick read (only a 4 hour audiobook, so I can only imagine how short the actual book is), easy to put down, because each chapter is a short essay or remembrance.

Although this wasn't as good to me as the first two books, I really enjoyed Country Days for its short views into everyday life. I missed the lovely detailed descriptions of how things were done that the first two books had.

This book frustrated me so much, that I finished it to discover why it got to me so. There could be something to the material perhaps, these quiet scenes of Irish daily life, but Alice Taylor does not make them shine at all. I wonder how it gets almost four stars on average here.

The first of the short stories, Nanna's Corset, is a really wonderful remembrance of an endless summer outdoors at the end of childhood. However, then the stories become increasingly full of clichés, and the sentences full of jarring adverbs. The attempts at wittiness made me wonder who'd think they are original in any way.

All in all, it was a grating experience. The lack of richness in language and no deftness in description made it feel like a diary that should either have been kept private, or should have undergone much more rigorous editing - to weed out all the supposedly smart metaphors that just make it all sound plain and unimaginative.

To demonstrate how it regularly misses the mark, I'll quote the last line of the book:

"They had come to hear my story but each of them had their own story, some ordinary and some extraordinary, and sometimes in life the ordinary can be extraordinary."

If you think that's clever, then you should read the book.