This Is Happiness by Niall Williams

I had two recommendations to read this book, one from Ann Patchett on her weekly videos from her bookstore, Parnassus Books, and the other was from a woman who I have shared reading loves with for 30 years, and so the double whammy rose this to the top of my books to read, that and the fact that I could not renew it--possibly stemming from one of the other of my two sources. It is set in rural Ireland at the time that a town is getting electricity. It is being added to the grid, and while there are a lot of things about that to be excited about, not everyone agrees that it is a good thing. They do have a point, those nay sayers. There are things that will change forever and there will not be an option to change that. The process of progress is the subtext here, what is lost and what is gained, and the inevitability of it, but the concomitant sadness about what changes and goes away. I did not love this book the way that my friend and Ann Patchett did, but it made me think a lot, and that, after all, is part of why I read, and in thinking I realized that it is a different sort of book, one that I do not seek out so much as be thankful that I read it.