It's that time of year again, the one euphemistically known as "the marching season". The season of mayhem, provocation and triumphalism all wrapped up in an archaic orange sash. Festivities kicked off prematurely as always with the now "traditional" burning of a Catholic Church. This time it was Portadown's turn and some "cultural" exchanges with Catholic kids on a North Belfast housing estate that culminated in arson attacks on their homes.

Leinster House has gone quackers and it has nothing to do with the 12-week summer break the Government has imposed on the house or Michael McDowell's penchant for chewing gum in the Dáil.

 Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.  The Althorp Literary Festival. Welsh fiction Richard Gwyn's The Colour of a Dog Running Away and finally A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Grimstone's Ghost by Mary Arrigan. Twelve year old Cian O'Horgan arrives with his mother and sister Jo at the great, dark, depressing mansion that he has inherited from his great uncle, Cian O'Horgan.

Luis Munoz endured a childhood filled with illness and pain which served in some ways as a preparation for the torture he would endure in a Chilean death camp in the 1970s. His fascinating memoirs offer an insight into an era blanked out of history books by 'official amnesia'. By Michael McCaughan

By recounting the basic tales of lives torn apart by the Holocaust but propelling them into a future of possible consequences, Hanna Krall risks blending fact and fiction to a degree where neither remain credible. By Elena Lappin

For every hour of the day and night there is a different way of being idle, which is why Tom Hodgkinson has written his book in 24 chapters. At 8am ('Waking Up Is Hard to Do'), true idlers turn off their alarms, flop over in bed and go back to sleep.

In a well-known spoof of a typical talk-radio exchange, two callers debate a fatuous point. The first says: "Right-thinking people in the US are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up with this country being sick and tired. I'm certainly not and I'm sick and tired of being told that I am." The second caller retorts, "Well, I meet a lot of people, and I'm convinced that the vast majority of wrong-thinking people are right." A conservative housewife, listening to the blather, snaps, "Liberal rubbish!" and turns the dial.

In the long-running dispute over Shell's high-pressure gas pipeline in North Mayo, which has resulted in five local men being jailed by the High Court at the request of the multinational, the objections of those living close to the pipeline tend to be juxtaposed against the "national interest" and Mayo's "regional development". But just what will the benefits to Ireland be?

Róisín Shorthall is anti-abortion, thinks curfews should be imposed on young people and has said the social welfare system encourages some young women to have babies by rewarding them financially. Yet she is seen as one of the strongest female left-wing voices in the Dáil.