I once heard the late, great actor and storyteller Eamonn Kelly describe the three most useless things in life. It is too early on a Saturday morning to mention two of them, which related to the religious life; but the third was those reviews in the magazine Stage, which invariably seemed to appeared after the play had closed, writes Dermot Bolger.
In keeping with this tradition, let me tell you about an event happening today in the Plaza hotel in Tallaght which you simply cannot attend because the two librarians in charge, Betty Stenson and Georgina Byrne, along with the local arts officer, Patricia Fitzgerald, have been beating away disappointed punters with big sticks for the past three weeks since it sold out.
Quite simply it is a celebration of possibly the most vital - and certainly the most neglected - figure in literature: the reader. In Heinrich Böll's short story The Perfect Reader, an obscure novelist eventually and with huge difficulty tracks down the only reader to have ever purchased a copy of his book. "You are a genius," the awed reader proclaims. "On the contrary," the overawed writer assures him, "it is you who are the genius."
Personally I agree with the writer and what I love about today's joint initiative by south Co Dublin's Libraries and Arts Office is that it cherishes that essential role of the reader. Obviously great poems are great poems even when undiscovered, as with the poetry of Dickinson and Hopkins. But for me literature only truly has life breathed into it when an anonymous reader takes down a book and willingly invests his or her time in allowing the phantoms which haunted somebody else's mind to take on a renewed existence in his or her own imagination.
Today's list of speakers contains many well-known names in Irish literature, but long before any of the writers taking part ever dreamed of one day seeing a book by us in print we were readers, and I suspect that this is first and foremost what we remain. There are landmarks in life that you never forget: the first day at school, first kiss, first proper book. Mine was Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. I can still vividly recall the spring day when, as a 12-year-old, I became utterly immersed in a fresh imaginative world while sitting beneath great blossoming lilac trees in a Finglas garden. No physical journey I've ever made since has quite matched those first steps into a new imaginative way of thinking about and seeing the world.
I have been shaped not just by the events of my life but by the books that fell into my hands. Among my most treasured possessions is the tiny 1970 New Writers' Press edition of Michael Hartnett's Selected Poems. He was all of 31 at the time and looks about 13 on the cover.
The excitement of discovering those poems at the age of 15 was still so great that I physically shook when I first met him when I was 22 and he wound up enthralling the entire staff and queue in Macari's chip shop in Finglas.
If writing is a solitary occupation (with the only two perks being that it was cheap and you didn't have to dress up for it) then, until fairly recently, reading was an equally solitary pursuit which occasionally left you longing to run into the street and stop strangers to tell them about a book that especially excited you. Now, however, it can be more of a communal event, thanks to the marvellous advent of the readers' group. Betty Stenson (whom I recall - during my brief stint as Ireland's worst ever library assistant - first arriving up to the libraries on a cart from Abbeyfeale at 17 with the dust of the road on her bare feet) tells me that there are now five such readers' groups based out of south Dublin's libraries, regularly meeting up to exchange ideas and opinions about books.
Today is the first time they will come together to meet each other and talk to writers such as Peter Sheridan, Rita Ann Higgins, Joseph O'Connor and Philip Casey. As the host of Ireland's best-known book club on her radio show, Marian Finucane will chair a panel discussion. If it is exciting for the readers, groups, it is also exciting for writers, because while reviews are all good and well, reviewers get the books for free. I have found as a novelist that the most wonderful surprise is an unsolicited letter from a reader who has actually bought a book and been sufficiently moved - either with pleasure or annoyance - to write to its author.
Writers lead solitary lives and their books often seem to vanish into a dark space. To meet a reader is to hear a response echoing back and to know that for one moment your dreams have not just become real again in somebody else's mind, but real in a way that you never intended and cannot control. Each time a book is read it becomes a new work of literature, infused with each new reader's personal memories. This day is a celebration of that special experience.
Ask your local library if it hosts a readers' group. It will save you running out to mug strangers every time you need to share the news about a good book.