the last book I ever read (The Van: A Novel by Roddy Doyle, excerpt five)

from The Van: A Novel (The Barrytown Trilogy) by Roddy Doyle:

He didn’t think he was being selfish. At first-during the first week or so-he’d felt a bit guilty, a bit of a bollix, because Bimbo was so miserable and he was the opposite. He couldn’t wait to get up and out in the mornings, like a fuckin’ kid on his summer holliers. But he didn’t think that way any more. Because he was helping Bimbo really. He wasn’t denying that he was delighted that Bimbo wasn’t working—not that he’d told anyone—but he didn’t have to feel bad about it because, after all, he hadn’t given poor Bimbo the sack and he’d never even wished it. And if Bimbo ever got his job back or got a new one he’d be the first one to slap him on the back and say Sound man. And he’d mean it as well.

But Bimbo was sacked; it was a fact. He was hanging around doing nothing. And Jimmy Sr was hanging around doing nothing, so the two of them might as well hang around and do fuckin’ nothing together. Only, with the two of them, they could do plenty of things. Playing pitch and putt by yourself on a cold March morning could be very depressing but with someone else to go around with you it could be a great bit of gas. And it was the same with just walking along the seafront; and anything really.

the last book I ever read (The Van: A Novel by Roddy Doyle, excerpt four)

from The Van: A Novel (The Barrytown Trilogy) by Roddy Doyle:

—Are we goin’ or wha’? said Paddy.

The plan was, they were all going down to the seafront with a couple of sixpacks. They’d decided this after Paddy had been complaining about all the kids that were down there every night.

—All ages, he’d told them.—Polluted out of their heads.

—That’s shockin’, Bimbo’d said.

And then Bertie’d said that they should go down there themselves after they were flung out of the boozer, and that was where they were going now. So—

the last book I ever read (The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke, excerpt eight)

the last book I ever read (The Van: A Novel by Roddy Doyle, excerpt three)

from The Van: A Novel (The Barrytown Trilogy) by Roddy Doyle:

He was in Bimbo’s house.

If he’d been in his own gaff he wouldn’t have been sitting like this, like a gobshite, too far back in the armchair—he couldn’t get out of the fuckin’ thing because his hands were full. He didn’t want to put the can or the bottle on one of the arms of the chair because the wood was at an angle like a ski jump and very shiny; he could smell the polish. And Bimbo’s kids were flying around the place, in and out, like fuckin’-kids. And this fuckin’ tie he had on him, it was killing him; it was sawing the fuckin’ neck off him. It was the shirt, a new one Veronica’d given him; she said he’d put on weight. It wasn’t fuckin’ fair: he was drinking far less but he was getting fuckin’ fatter. She said he was anyway. She’d probably said it because it was either that or admit that she’d bought him the wrong size of a shirt. Anyway, he was fuckin’ choking and he couldn’t loosen the poxy tie because his fuckin’ hands were full—

Jesus tonight!

the last book I ever read (The Van: A Novel by Roddy Doyle, excerpt two)

from The Van: A Novel (The Barrytown Trilogy) by Roddy Doyle:

He came off the Green, crossed the road. The street light here was broken again. The glass was on the path. It was always this one they smashed, only this one.

It was funny; he’d been really grateful when young Jimmy had given him the fiver, delighted, and at the same time, or just after, he’d wanted to go after him and thump the living shite out of him and throw the poxy fiver back in his face, the nerve of him; who did he think he was, dishing out fivers like Bob fuckin’ Geldof.

the last book I ever read (The Van: A Novel by Roddy Doyle, excerpt one)

from The Van: A Novel (The Barrytown Trilogy) by Roddy Doyle:

Jimmy Sr was in the ILAC library, in town.

It was terrific here, very nice.

He’d never been in here before. It was great. There was a lot more to it than just the books. You could get tapes or records out or even those compact discs, or just listen to them in here. He’d go over there, to the music part, after this. There was a language resource centre, a room where you could learn more than sixty languages in one of those booth things. Or you could use the computer-he looked at the brochure again—to enhance your computer literacy skills. There was even a reading machine for if you had sight problems. Having one of them beside the bed would have been very handy for when you came home scuttered at night.

the last book I ever read (Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe, excerpt fourteen)

from Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe by Fred C. Abrahams:

At the same time, the government maintained its pro-Western stance as a moderating force in the Balkans and, since 9/11, an enthusiastic contributor to the “war on terror.” A few hundred Albanian soldiers were already deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. In May 2004, before the elections, and again in October 2005, under Berisha, Albania helped the CIA with the agency’s network of illegal secret prisons for terrorism suspects—the so-called “black sites.” In 2006 Albania began accepting for resettlement some prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay.

In September 2006, Berisha hired former U.S. secretary of homeland security Tom Ridge as a consultant for $480,000 per year. The main goal, Berisha and Ridge announced, was to win Albania full membership in NATO. In violation of U.S. law, Ridge failed to register his contract with the U.S. government for twenty-one months, and he did so only after a Justice Department investigation. One month after signing up Ridge, Albania sealed a $535 million no-bid contract with the U.S. construction firm Bechtel and its Turkish partner Enka to build a thirty-seven-kilometer highway through the rugged northern mountains as part of an ambitious project to link the port of Durres with Kosovo. The Albanian minister who signed the deal, Lulzim Basha, was later indicted for fraud, but the case was dismissed on technical grounds after what the U.S. embassy called “shaky rulings” by the court.