Review: In Castle and Court House: Being Reminiscences of 30 Years in Ireland by Ramsay Colles

I like to buy books about the places I've traveled and if I can do so while in that place, at a local bookshop, even better. So I picked up this reprint of Ramsay Colles' work while in Dublin, thinking that it would be an interesting read about a long disappeared Ireland and of Colles' experiences there. Clearly I didn't examine the book closely enough before I brought it home because this was quite possibly the driest and most boring thing I've ever read about this fascinating and beautiful country full of a million stories worth telling.

Colles spends an inordinate amount of time recounting his own (and his family's) importance by name dropping and patting himself on the back for his own intelligence. He talks of his role in the politics of the day, diving into minutia that has not stood the test of time, extolls his connections and details his letter writing. Colles writes of people he has known, many of whom have since become much more obscure than they must have been in his day, and he feels compelled to share any actual or quasi-notable thing that relations, no matter how distant, of his have accomplished not only in Ireland but around the globe. He may well have been an important figure in Ireland's history (this ignorant American had never heard of him before) but even after reading this reminiscence of his own, I still couldn't say whether he was actually important or merely puffed up by a feeling of his own importance. I can, however, say unreservedly that he is an insufferable bore, as is this book. Did I miss kernels of interesting things? Perhaps. But when your eyes are so glazed over that you can hardly see the words, you might be forgiven for this possible failing.