It was raining in Ireland, and it was starting to get me down.
Before you say, "It always rains in Ireland!" let me tell you: I've been to Ireland many times, and yes, it rains. It rains, and then it gets sunny, or it rains, and then it stops. Many's the time I have worn sunglasses and had the windshield wipers going because the weather couldn't make up its mind.
But this trip was different. This trip was all-day-and-all-night-and-all-day downpours.
It might not have mattered that much, but my husband and I were there to hike.
In the remote village of Allihies where we were holed up, rain streamed past the windows of our B&B and flags snapped in the wind. The trails we had planned to walk squelched with standing water, the mountaintops we hoped to cross were enshrouded in fog. We couldn't hike, and so we read.
Allihies consisted of a tiny grocery, a cafe, a pub and a scattering of houses. There was no bookstore, no library. Fortunately, we had crammed our suitcases with books.
So I switched on the tea kettle and dove into "Say Nothing," Patrick Radden Keefe's nonfiction book about the Irish Troubles. It was so good that it made me wish we were in Belfast instead of West Cork, though it was also raining in Belfast.
It rained the next day, too, and I turned to "She Said," by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the New York Times reporters who had broken the Harvey Weinstein story. Meanwhile, my husband was steadily reading Kevin Barry's "Night Boat to Tangier," a novel about two aging Irish thugs.