What with the snow (frost anyway) and a sudden flurry of Christmas cards through the letterbox, I’m starting to feel in holiday mode, though I plan to do some work on the latest book this afternoon, honestly! However I’m currently listening to a bit of festive music while I type. Of course I keep stopping to sing along though I use the word ‘sing’ advisedly – I haven’t a note in my head.

Anyway I thought that, before I started this afternoon’s work, I’d have a little think back on 2009 in terms of books and how things went.

Like all retailers, booksellers have had a tough year. Fortunately books continue to be great value for money but the lack of people in shopping centres has had an effect on turnover in all bookshops. The loss of Borders first in Ireland and now the UK is a great shame. I know that many people perfer small independent bookstores to big franchises but losing any bookseller when you love books is sad. The staff of Borders were always lovely to me whenever I called in to sign books and were very knowledgeable about their vast stock. I hope that they all find jobs worthy of their talents.

Despite the difficult times, though, many of the booksellers I met during 2009 were gamely optimistic, mainly because most of them love books so much that they can’t imagine anyone not wanting to buy them! When I was younger I wanted to own a bookshop because I thought I could spend loads of time reading all the stock – but actually booksellers need to be fit and healthy so that they can open all the boxes and stack the shelves. During the working day they don’t have time to read books at all and so the fact that they do read so many when they get home shows the passion that they have. I would have been a terrible bookseller but I’m fortunate that I now know so many good ones!

Before I started writing I used to go into bookshops and marvel and the number and variety of books I could choose from. Now I panic at the number and variety of books by other authors on the shelves!! I wonder how on earth anyone will choose one of mine out of the massive displays and I start counting the number of family members I have who I know will buy at least one….

However I’ve been very lucky – people have seen my books and they have bought them – and 2009 was especially wonderful for me because of the great success of Someone Special both in Ireland and the UK, and in lots of other countries too. It’s currently being translated into more languages and I hope that those of you who haven’t yet read it will enjoy it. The Perfect Man was also hugely successful – it comes out in paperback in 2010 so I’m nervously waiting to see will it be visible in the shops among everything else. I don’t think any author ever loses the sense of terror on publication day and I’m still as worried as I was when my very first book was published.

But what’s different now is that I have so many readers who get in touch so quickly and so often and who are incredibly generous and supportive. I assure you that I do read all of your comments and questions on the site and that I love hearing from you. This year I’ve had even more messages than usual, and from more and more countries too. Thanks especially to all my new Swedish readers who’ve got in touch this year – I enjoyed my visit to your country tremendously and am definitly planning a return trip. I like the idea of going in the summer when the days never end. Thanks also to those of you who emailed from Canada, Australia, the Caribbean and South Africa, as well as all over Europe. And another bout of thanks to my US readers – I do hope that I will get a new US publisher soon so that you can access my books more easily. I realise that it’s annoying for you to be buying from overseas. Obviously the recession has hampered our efforts but fingers are crossed for good news in the coming months.

I know that I’m lucky because I do something I love and I get paid for it. Obviously the bank manager likes the cheques – and so do I – but truthfully the biggest pleasure I get is knowing that you’ve enjoyed a book. All of my life I’ve loved reading and I’ve loved losing myself in a good book. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is when someone tells me that they’ve had that same experience reading one of mine!!

One of the questions people ask me a lot is what I like to read myself. And it’s difficult to answer because I love so many different types of books and so many different writers. I’m friends with many of my feloow Irish writers and so enjoying their books is a given, but this year I also liked Phillipa Gregory’s latest historical novel, The White Queen. I hated history at school but the older I get the more relevance I realise it has. However if Philippa had been writing then my knowledge of the Tudors would have been good enough not to have had received a ‘could do better’ from my history teacher when I had to turn in an essay on Henry VIII.

I was halfway through American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld before I realised it was based on the life of Laura Bush. To be honest that sort of spoiled it for me – up until then I’d found it engrossing but afterwards I couldn’t get Laura and George out of my head. The end is a bit rushed and we never get to see how it is that Charlie (the George character) builds up the support to run for President. But the first half of the book is absolutely wonderful! (I do like how she writes; her first book, Prep, was a great ‘coming of age’ novel).

I finished the Steig Larsson trilogy with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and was very satisfied at how it all worked out, though I did think that it could have been edited a bit more. Unfortunately these days I tend to read books with an eye to the editing as well as the story! I also enjoyed The Piiano Teacher by Janice YK Lee which was hugely evokative of Hong Kong during WW2.

And now I realise that nearly every book I’ve read this year has been set in the past – including the bookI’m currently reading, Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith which is set in the 1950′s Soviet Union. Gripping stuff so far – I’ve always enjoyed those Cold War era books.

Included in my big pile of books yet to read is Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (more history!!) as well as Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver and Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin (well, I had to have a financial crisis book in there somewhere…)

But back to the writing….I’m editing Stand by Me and making notes about the novel after that. Each time I finish a book I think ‘never again’ and then something clicks inside and I can’t stop myself. I’ll keep you all up to date on the progress of my books during 2010 and do please continue to keep in touch with me too.

You can also become a fan on my Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sheila-OFlanagan/76757075181?ref=ts or follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/sheilaoflanagan (I’m not a daily tweeter but every so often I do a flurry!) and, of course, keep checking the website for news or extracts of books.

Thank you all for your support and your company in 2009. Have a lovely, lovely Christmas and holiday season and a spectacularly wonderful New Year.

love

Sheila