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.

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

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

After blocking KLA supplies since November 1998, Prime Minister Majko opened the gates. Albania accepted thousands of young Kosovar men from abroad who wanted to fight. They came by plane and boat, leaving lives as students and workers in Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, and the United States. “I’m here to defend my people,” one young man told me as we rode the ferry from Italy to Durres, just before he vomited into the sea.

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

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

February 20 is an important date in Albania’s history, and Vlora’s citizens were keenly aware. Seven years before in Tirana, crowds had toppled Enver Hoxha’s monument in Skanderbeg Square, marking the symbolic end of the dictatorship. To commemorate the event in 1997, Vlora demonstrators raised three fingers in the air on February 17—two fingers and the thumb—as a sign that Berisha had three days left. The three-fingered salute, an evolution of the Democratic Party’s two-fingered victory sign for freedom and democracy, quickly spread through Albania as a symbol of anti-government rage.

For ethnic Albanians in Kosovo watching the revolt on television, the three fingers were a confusing and offensive shock. Kosovars knew the sign as a Serbian nationalist salute that police waved aggressively in their faces every day. “Is this Albania or Angola?” a stunned friend in Kosovo asked as we watched the Vlora protests on television. “Don’t they know what that means?”

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

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

By late 1995, the Bosnian war was coming to a close. The presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia signed the Dayton peace accords in December and the United Nations lifted sanctions on Yugoslavia. Overnight, Albania lost its lucrative oil market to the north. Albania had always maintained that its fuel imports only met domestic need, but with the sanctions busting gone, oil imports dropped.

One month later, the pyramid schemes began to shake. Without a steady income from smuggling, the schemes were forced to recruit an ever-growing number of investors. To attract new principal, they raised their monthly rates, setting in motion a downward spiral that ended in their dramatic crash.