Reading in Reykjavík

It's time to wrap up my first challenge of the year. I signed up for the What's in a Name challenge on August 12, so I was late to the game, but not as late as in 2012, when I started at the end of August. I posted my first review on August 18, and the last on September 27, so it took me 6 weeks, give or take, to finish it - counted in reading time, not by reviewing dates. The challenge got me back in the groove of reading, as I had been in the kind of slump where I wanted desperately to read but couldn't decide which TBR book to pick up next, so I usually ended up with rereads or loan books I needed to return soon. The challenge gave me something solid to base my choices on, and as a matter of fact I think I may continue letting my book choices be guided in a similar way. One coffee break at work when I had nothing better to do I decided it might be fun to see what categories had been used in previous What's in a Name challenges that I had not participated i...

Genre : Historical mystery. Themes : Deception, escape, forced marriage, murder. Reading challenge : What's in a Name , the book with a profession in the title, and my final book for this challenge. I was planning to read a piece of social history, What the Butler Saw: Two hundred and fifty years of the servant problem , for this challenge, but looking over my bookshelves I spotted the 8 books I had left to read in the Brother Cadfael historical mystery series, and couldn't resist picking the next one as the final book in the challenge: The Hermit of Eyton Forest . Now, some might say that being a hermit is a religious vocation rather than a profession, but in fact there once existed a professional class of ornamental or garden hermits . They were men who were specifically hired and paid to live in hermitages or other suitable structures on great estates and to be full-time hermits for a given length of time, generally seven years. I read the previous book in the serie...

Genre : Travel. Themes : Travel, religion, magic, people, Benin, West Africa, friendship. Reading challenge : What's in a Name 2016 Challenge book no. : 5/6, a book with a country in the title. Writer Annie Caulfield travelled to Benin with the specific intention of writing a travel book, or so it seems from what she writes in the book. She describes her travels around the country by taxi, visiting vodou practitioners and religious sites, tribal leaders and interesting people and places with her driver, Isidore, as an active participant. He became her friend and seems to have had a hand in finding people and things of interest for her to visit. The outcome is a fascinating and often funny book about a country that is little known or spoken of outside of West Africa. It was interesting to read this book and compare it with the last book I read about Africa, Blood River . These books were published at an interval of about 5 years and there is such a difference between them. ...

The cover of my copy. Genre: Historical murder mystery; detective fiction.   Themes: Murder, secrets, false identities, false pretences, unexpected visitors, movies, young love.  Reading challenge: What's in a Name 2016 Challenge book no.: 4/6, a book with an item of clothing in the title. The titular mink (a coat) is the property of one of the characters in this frothy and funny country-house murder mystery. (You will have to read the book if you want to know how and why it got mutilated). The Affair of the Mutilated Mink and the books that preceded it and followed it, The Affair of the Blood-stained Egg Cosy and The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks , have been justifiably called tributes to the Golden Era mystery, and one quickly realises that it doesn't take place in some unspecified version of the 1930s, but specifically the 1930s of the detective novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Michael Innes, whose detectives, Wimsey, Alleyn and Appleby, ...

Genre: Historical romance; Regency romance. Themes: Marriage problems, love, misunderstandings (big mis, no less), gambling, damsels in distress.  Reading challenge: What's in a Name 2016 Challenge book no.: 3/6, a book with the name of a month in the title. First I must say that when I was looking for a picture of the cover of the edition I read, I found so many nice ones that I decided to post several. The one on the left is the cover I was looking for and you will find the rest below. This one and the next one (from the original hard-cover edition) are my favourites.  If you know anything about fashion history you will soon spot the errors in some of the cover images (e.g. too early, too late), and if you have read the book, you will spot more (wrong hair-colour, events that did not take place in the story). This is a story that hinges on one of those plot elements that I hate: the big misunderstanding . It doesn't help that there is also a spoiled, ...

Genre: Detective fiction, murder mystery. Themes: Murder, secrets.  Reading challenge: What's in a Name 2016 Challenge book no.: 2/6, a book with a type of furniture in the title. It's been ages since I read a proper mystery, and this is definitely one of those.   It begins, like several of Christie's other stories, with a dinner party that ends in murder.  This is a murder-magnet tale, i.e. one of those Poirot books where he is present, or as good as, when a murder takes place and the police ask him to assist in solving it, but he is still the principal detective (of course).  What's interesting about this story is that Poirot has no fewer than three Watsons to assist him, or rather: they work together to solve the case, with facts found out by each contributing to Poirot being able to work out the truth. Two of those Watsons, Colonel Race and Superintendent Battle, are also Christie detectives in their own right (the former in Sparkling Cyanid...

Genre: Expat memoir. Subjects: Spain, farming, country life, daily life, people and animals. Reading challenge: What's in a Name 2016 Challenge book no.: 1, a book with the word "tree" in the title. This is the sequel to Stewart’s bestseller, Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia , which I read and enjoyed not long after it was published, but did not review. I can’t really compare the two books, because it has been over 10 years since I read the other and I can’t really remember much about it. This is one of the books in the popular genre that Peter Mayle (another successful expat author) calls “being there” books (and I have sometimes called "Brits abroad" books, because so many of the authors are British). Such books can be either enjoyable or annoying, and fortunately this one falls into the former category. This is not one of those “ good life ” books that some people like to deride. At the point in time portrayed in the book - beginni...

Apropos of yesterday’s first post I decided to sign up for the What's in a Name reading challenge .  I have mostly been reading loan books and ebooks lately, while my TBR stack has been swelling and threatening to take over my library (it's currently at around 40% of my books), Therefore I decided to try to read as many books from my TBR stack of physical books as possible. Guess what? I found books that fit all the categories! Below is a list of the possible reads. First you see the category and then a list of books.The ones in parentheses are ebooks, but I will only resort to those if I find the others uninteresting, boring or otherwise unreadable. I have bolded the ones I am most inclined to read, but that doesn’t put the others out of the running. My mood may, after all, have changed once I get to them. Once I have finished a particular category, I will strike out the category and underline the book I chose. The rest of the rules and guidelines can be found ...