Finished ordering small token thank you gifts for my committee members. I should probably order something extra for my advisor who really did read many, many drafts of my project.
I sent them each a book and a film.

One pick was "At Swim, Two Boys" by Jamie O'Neill. The novel offers multiple points of view across class, gender, sexual, and political positions in Ireland leading up to the Easter Rising. At the center is a beautiful love story between two adolescent boys who grow into young men.

Peter Behren's "The Law of Dreams" went to one professor who takes a personal interest in the period known as the Great Hunger or Victorian Holocaust. The image that stayed with me from that novel was the description of the starving peasants whose faces were covered in a thick dark downy fur as a result of the forced famine. It makes me shudder. It's also a real page turner.

I sent the two women on my committee Anna Burns' "No Bones." In my estimation it is one of the best novels about the Troubles. It unfolds through the little girl Amelia Lovett who experiences beginning in 1969 trace the physical and psychological trauma collectively experienced in Belfast. Amelia's anorexia and mental collapse are a direct result of living in an armed patriarchy.

The films were "Breakfast on Pluto," "The Butcher Boy," and "Bloom," which adapts Joyce's "Ulysses." After watching "Bloom" I will forever picture Stephen Rea when I think of Leopold Bloom, as well as Angeline Ball for Molly. It's a lush and bold film.