Gerald J. Butler Livres

Love and Reading discusses 18th and 19th Century English fiction, the aesthetics of Burke and Kant, and contemporary literary theory. It stresses that language should be referential and argues for a way of reading that would not provide narcissistic a way of reading that would enable us instead to see through «the huge and terrible deception,» as Tolstoy put it, that hides «both life and death.»

The author was one of Ireland's last lightkeepers. Until they were fully automated in the 1990s, he spent over 21 years tending to many lighthouses around the coast of Ireland. In this book, he recalls the thrills, trials, tragedies, triumphs and dangers of serving on lighthouses such as Bull Rock, Mizen Head, and the infamous Fastnet Rock.