Meme: Top Ten Books I Can't Believe I've Never Read

Meme: Top Ten Books I Can't Believe I've Never Read – TBR bookshelf edition

As my regular visitors will have noticed, I’m going a bit nuts with memes. This one was thought up by Julia of The Broke and the Bookish and properly belongs to Top Ten Tuesday postings, but as I came to it late I am posting it today.

There were so many books to choose from that I decided to only include books that I actually own (and have in some cases owned for several years).

Brennu-Njáls Saga (The Saga of Burnt Njal) – This is one of the longer Sagas and by all accounts a juicy one, full of heroism, betrayals, passion, revenge, conspiracies and blood-feuds, but I have never got round to reading it. Shame on me, as this is one of the fundamental works of Icelandic literature.
Don Quixote by Cervantes – I actually bought a copy a couple of years ago, but I have never felt in the mood to read it.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke – I have started reading this something like five times, and never been able to bring myself to read farther than about 50 pages. However, I know this is a book I could like.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón – Same story as with Jonathan Strange, except only three tries.
After Babel by George Steiner – I have an M.A. degree in translation and this is a seminal book in that field, so I really should have read it, but I haven’t.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas – I have read a couple of edited versions and one comic book and have seen several movies based on it, but I have never read the whole thing.
The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer (shorter version) – As someone who is deeply interested in folktales, mythology and anthropology, I feel I should have read this, even if some of the theories are now considered a bit dodgy.
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco – After reading what Eco said about it in Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation, I decided I wanted to read it, but it has been in my TBR bookcase for 5 years and still remains unread.
The Once and Future King by T.H. White – I have actually finished the first book, The Sword in the Stone, and started the second, The Queen of Air and Darkness, but I never got any further, yet I loved it. Still can’t quite understand why I didn’t go on with it.
The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin – My regular readers will know that I actually started reading this one a couple of months ago and then put it on hold, but it fits the meme because I have owned this book for over 4 years without reading it, and yet I love travelogues.

Honourable mention that I don’t own but feel a bit guilty for not having read:
Sjálfstætt Fólk (Independent People) by Halldór Laxness – This is supposed to be THE Icelandic literary masterpiece, but I have never been able to bring myself to read it because I hate the way Laxness has written just about all the female main characters in those of his books I have read.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

Search This Blog