Tana French’s Top 9 Favorite Things
Forget raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens… or maybe not!
The international bestselling writer, Tana French, is responsible for penning some of our favorite psychological thrillers of late, including In the Woods, The Secret Place, and most recently The Trespasser. Her Dublin Murder Squad series bucks the traditions of crime fiction, creating a world by turns tense, eerie, sometimes magical, but always mysterious. So what else delights the mind of this brilliant Irish/American author dedicated to the depths of character, human fallibility, and pursuing the unknown? Read on.
Tom Waits.
There’s no one who can take your heart to pieces quite as thoroughly as him. If you really feel like being devastated, I recommend ‘Green Grass’.
thehistoryblog.com.
I am a huge history geek and this blog is my fix. The blogger is ferociously smart, knowledgeable, funny and passionate, and every day he or she comes up with a cool story from the past, or an amazing archaeological discovery, or some great historical artifact along with its backstory.
Jim Beam maple whiskey.
I like it with Coke, which is probably all kinds of wrong, but I don’t care.
The Bridge.
Dark, intense, brilliant Danish/Swedish police procedural series. Great characters, great acting, and I love the fact that the female characters are defined by who they are as people rather than by the fact that they’re women. That shouldn’t be a big deal, but it still is.
An artist called Sean Molloy.
He takes elements from baroque paintings and overpaints them with digital-looking layers — neon slashes or pixels over an Old Master portrait, that kind of thing. Somehow he makes you see the underlying painting very differently, and I like that.
The Fortean Times magazine.
It’s about weird stuff, everything from ghosts and UFOs to the Angels of Mons and fish falling from the sky. The people behind it aren’t skeptics (although they do debunk a fair number of stories) or believers; they’re just people who find odd phenomena really interesting.
The temporary tattoos from litographs.com and tattify.com.
I’ve always liked the idea of a tattoo, but so far I haven’t come up with anything that I’m positive I want to wear for the rest of my life. So till I do, I half-ass it with these. My collarbone currently says ‘Let life be merry.’
Dark chocolate with sea salt from the Cocoa Bean Chocolate Company. There’s no point in eating chocolate if it isn’t this.
Donal Ryan.
His The Spinning Heart is the best book I’ve ever read about Celtic Tiger Ireland. It’s moving, darkly funny and beautifully written, and every one of the many voices rings absolutely true.
Tana French’s newest novel is The Trespasser, published by Viking Books.
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