A bit of literature

I have been re-reading Flann O'Brien's comic oddity At Swim-Two-Birds, to while away the time during this neverending holiday. I don't like it nearly as much as The Third Policeman (his masterpiece, in my view), but it still has some wonderful phrases in it. Like this fine description of being down the pub.... "That same afternoon I was sitting on a stool in an intoxicated condition in Grogan's licensed premises. Adjacent stools bore the forms of Brinsley and Kelly, my two true friends. The three of us were occupied in putting glasses of stout into the interior of our bodies and expressing by fine disputation the resulting sense of physical and mental well-being." After a few hours of reading Finn MacCool (a legendary Irish hero who appears as one of the characters in the book and speaks with the charmingly eccentric syntax of old Gaelic), I find myself expressing my reluctance to come out to play tonight in terms such as this... "Money is the thing I have none of."