Reading in Reykjavík

Today's subject on Booking Through Thursday is dogs and other pets: My dog just had his birthday (12 years old, thanks), so … how do you feel about books about dogs or pets? Fluffy stories of fluffy family members? Solid books on training them or taking care of them? Touching reminiscences of trouble and the way a person’s dog (or pet) has helped get them through? (Mind you, almost all the pet-related books on my shelf are about dogs, but I’m well aware that people love their cats, horses, ferrets, rabbits, fish, etc. just as much, so … any species is fine!) Any favorite books to recommend? I used to love animal books and still read them occasionally. My favourite books featuring pets specifically are by Gerald Durrell, who kept a varied and exotic menagerie of pets throughout his life and ended up running a zoo, and the books by Yorkshire veterinarian Alf Wight, writing as James Herriot, about the animals he treated through his years in pr...

Hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, Top Ten Tuesdays is a weekly meme where we post about top ten subjects relating to books. This time around it's "Top Ten Books I've Read So Far In 2013". Here are mine, in no particular order: A travelogue with a difference. From the Author's Note: "This tale is the story of a real journey made in 1969 by a group of Indian villagers. For a short time I was able to travel with them. I travelled 15,000 kilometres in the third - class carriages of Indian Railways, over a period of seven months. ... To the villagers the journey was an adventure thrust upon them by unexpected fate when their kindly landowner died leaving her wealth in a trust fund for her villagers. Many of them found the confrontation with the world beyond their village alarming and unsettling. After their travels they returned to the years of crisis and war which resulted in the formation of Bangladesh and the tidal wave, famines and struggle which fo...

Top Ten Tuesdays is a weekly meme run by The Broke and the Bookish . This week we post the top 10 books we go to when we need something light and fun. My list is below, and you can find more here . I like visual humour, so it is really no surprise that more than half my choices are picture books of some kind. The rest are reliable light and humorous novels. In no particular order: Anyone But You by Jennifer Crusie. He's 30. She's 40. She has a funny dog. It's a match made in heaven. Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett. Golden age Hollywood in a fantasy setting with horrible monsters from another dimension, blazing egos and talking dogs? Yes please. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. English humour at its finest. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. Takes me back to what it was like being six years old. The Hitch-hiker‘s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. A classic. One of my Lucky Luke comic books. One of my Calvin & Hobbes collections. One of m...

I haven’t participated in Top Ten Tuesdays for ages, but as it’s freebie week, I decided to enter one of my book lists. Do visit the hosting blog, The Broke and the Bookish , and click through to some of the other participating blogs. 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. Non-fiction. Lovely, lovely collection of letters between Hanff and the staff of a bookstore in England, written over a period of 20 years. Recommend the movie as well.  The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Written as a series of accounts of the theft of a precious stone, using different styles and voices. It’s long, but worth reading.  Letters to Alice, Upon First Reading Jane Austen by Fay Weldon. What the title says, plus much more besides. Discusses not only Austen, but the art of writing as well.  Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos. A novel told entirely in letters between the characters, a couple of scheming French aristocrats playing a dangerous game of seduction.  The Screwtap...

It's Tuesday, and that means the The Broke and the Bookish are accepting contributions to their Top Ten Tuesdays meme. There is a little bit of an anti-Valentine's Day sentiment going on, as they are asking for books that broke the readers' hearts a little. Please visit some of the other participating blogs. If you like books full of emotion, you may find some great reads. Warning: SPOILERS ahead! Anne of Green Gables , Anne’s House of Dreams and Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery. All concern deaths. If you have read them, you’ll know which ones. I’m counting them as one, because of the similar themes and because the books all belong to the same series. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. The book was fine - but the ending of the story of Arwen and Aragorn in the appendixes was heartbreaking. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Not because of Beth’s death, although that was sad, but because Jo’s dreams never came true. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pul...

It’s freebie week at The Broke and the Bookish , which means we can post and link a list of anything book-related, so I decided to use this List Love list I had prepared and enter it in the meme. Please click on the link above to visit the hosting blog and check out what the other participants have posted. I have read a fair bit of fantasy and horror literature over the years and some science fiction, and am now making inroads into urban fantasy. While I have been mostly lucky in my choices of reading material in those genres, I have come across some duds and a few really terrible books and short stories, and I have also come across tropes and clichés that I have disliked in stories that I have otherwise enjoyed. So here, without further ado, is a list of 10 things that irk me about fantasy, urban fantasy and science fiction: Over-complicated world-building, including when there is a map and the story takes place in 1/20th of the area shown and nothing of the rest is mentioned in t...

The Top Ten Tuesdays is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. To see more lists of useful and fun bookish resources, please visit the hosting site and click on any or all of the links to the participating blogs. Here are the 10 bookish places/resources I use the most, that are not blogs: Project Gutenberg : Thousands upon thousands of free e-books. Read them online or download them and read them on your computer or your e-reader. All books are in the public domain. If you want to read a classic and you don’t mind e-books, why buy them from Amazon when you can have them for free from Project Gutenberg? BookMooch . Actually I don’t go there so much nowadays, because there are very few Icelanders active on BM and fewer people abroad are sending books outside their country or continent because postal charges seem to have gone up everywhere (here too), plus customs regulations have changed here and I now have to pay customs for every book I receive. When people forget to ...

Top Ten Tuesdays is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. To see more lists of weird and wonderful places people would like to visit after having read about them in books, please visit the hosting site and click on any or all of the links to the participating blogs. There are so many places I would have liked to mention, but I am going to stick to ten places. However, next time I don’t participate in Top Ten Tuesdays, I just might post my alternative list of top ten settings instead... Middle-Earth , especially the Shire and Lothlorien. From The Lord of the Rings trilogy by Tolkien. In real world terms this means New Zealand, because since the movies it is Middle-Earth. The Discworld , esecially Anhk-Morpork and Lancre. From the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. Mind you, there are areas of Ankh I would rather avoid, but I would love to visit Unseen University and take a tour of the library in the company of the Librarian. I would also like to climb the Tower of Art and...

This meme is hosted by the Broke and the Bookish. To see more suggestions for holiday reads, please visit the hosting site and from there you can go to any or all of the other participating blogs. I do not sunbathe and therefore I present Top Ten Books that should be in my carry-on bag (or on my e-reader when I get one) to ensure enjoyment and variety on a long flight or an even longer bus or train ride. Also useful, in combination with an mp3 player, when you want to be left alone for any reason: Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. My all-time first choice for a travelling book. I know it so well that I can open it at random and begin reading on any page, yet I never grow tired of it. I am on my second copy, having read the first one to tatters. Alternative: Any of Pratchett's Discworld books. A travelogue of the place I am visiting. Preferably historical so I can make comparisons and annoy my co-tourists with useless trivia. One Georgette Heyer novel , because ...

( you know... all those great supporting character or a VERY minor character that might have been only in there a page or two but had an effect on you) Top Ten Tuesdays is a weekly blogging meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish . Please visit the hosting blog to see more lists. These are only the minor characters I could remember from off the top of my head, so if I were to do this list again it might look totally different. This very nearly became a Terry Pratchett only list, but I was able to restrain myself (but only just). In no particular order: Fred from Anyone But you by Jennifer Crusie. The archetypal lovable ugly mutt with a personality. Davy Dempsey from Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie. Sharp and dangerous and very probably a criminal but also a loving brother who will do anything to protect his family. I’m glad he got a book of his own ( Faking It ). Jemmy from Viscount Vagabond by Loretta Chase. My favourite lovable urchin. Greebo the cat from th...

Or, as they put it on the hosting blog: "( all those jerky guys in books..those who truly WERE asshats and those who just acted like one but could be quite loveable)" Please visit The Broke and the Bookish to see more lists of jerks in literature. There are no loveable jerks on my list, although some of them are protagonists (which, as we all know, is no guarantee that we will like the guy. Just witness Humbert Humbert in Lolita (who I couldn't include as I haven't read the book yet). Professor Snape from the Harry Potter books. He may have been a troubled hero, but he was also a huge jerk with a huge chip on his shoulder against Harry’s father that he took out on Harry. Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter books. Some people are just born mean. Add jealousy to the mix and you get Draco. Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. The worst kind of jerk: a whiny one. Hamlet from the play by Shakespeare. Another whiny jerk I wish would get ove...

The Top Ten Tuesdays meme is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Please visit the host site and click on some of the submitted links for more mean girls. They are the characters who can be the source of anything from minor twists to major plot complications. They are the bitches we love to hate, the women who can't help being nasty, the meanies who make life interesting and unpleasant for the protagonists, the wicked, the spiteful, and often the most memorable characters in literature: The Mean Girls. Jane Austen wrote some very realistic mean girls, including: Fannie (Mrs. John) Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility , Maria Bertram from Mansfield Park , and Caroline Bingley from Pride and Prejudice Other mean girls and women I'd like to slap around: Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling Scarlett O'Hara from Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. (love her or hate her, you must admit she is both mean and spiteful at t...

The Top Ten Tuesday meme is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Today's meme is about books we hope will be made into movies. To see more lists, visit the hosting blog and from there visit some of the other participating blogs. Hearing that a beloved book has been optioned for a movie can be both cause for anticipation and anxiety. Anticipation because when Hollywood gets it just right, you can add another movie to your favourite-movies-based-on-books list, and anxiety because when they don’t get it right it can range from mediocrity to disaster and, worse yet, discourage people from reading the book. Here’s a list of 10 books I’d like see made into movies - books I think would make fantastic movies if only they’d get it right. Since The Hobbit seems to finally be in production, it seems fairly certain that Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman is going to be made into a TV mini-series, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is listed on IMdb as bein...

This is the first time I participate in a Weekly Geeks theme.This week it's a meme: Tell us ten things about you with regard to books and reading. Let your imagination run wild!  Here goes:  I collect bookmarks and I match them to the books I read. I have never read 40% of my books. That’s not counting books that are not meant to be read from cover to cover.  I read, on average, about 160 books a year. Generally only one or two will have been published in that year. Since the year 2000 I have cut my rereading from about half of all the books I read in a year down to fewer than 10. About 70% of my books were bought second hand. I have about 150 cookbooks and regularly use 3 of them. I am usually reading 4+ books at a time. When I was a child and young teen, I would go deaf when I was reading. I would love to own an e-reader. I think people who highlight words, dog ear or tear out pages, smoke or apply perfume while they are reading library books should be pu...

The meme Top Ten Tuesdays is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish . If you want to see what irks other readers, go visit the mother site and click on some of the links to the other participating blogs. I have so many bookish peeves that I decided to just pick a random sample of 10 from my long-list. Movie covers on books. When a book has been adapted into a movie and they put the actors on the front to increase sales of the book.It rarely looks good and it spoils my perception of the characters - I like to imagine them myself rather than be told that this person looks like this actor, and so on, thank you very much. Errors on book covers . Here is a doozy . Too many spelling mistakes, typos and bad grammar. This makes me wonder if a book was self-published, or if both the editor and the proof-reader were having a bad day. Too much information on the back cover - especially when an important plot twist is given away. Perfect bound hardcovers. Why? The  book will fall apar...

The Top Ten Tuesdays meme is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Please visit the mother blog and click on some (or all) of the participating blogs to see more dynamic duos. After I drew up this list, I realised to my amazement that I had only put one romance supercouple on my list. This is perhaps because I decided to not include duos who are “just” great lovers, but who are also a great team in other respects. Eve and Roarke from the In Death books by Nora Roberts. Not only are they a sizzling couple, they also work well together solving crimes. Rincewind and the Luggage from the Discworld series. Together they can get into more trouble than a troop of street urchins and cause more mayhem than a reasonably large army of monkeys, but they always land on their feet again. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg from the Discworld series. One is sharply intelligent, openly powerful and intimidating, the other comforting and friendly and possessed of no less strong but much more subtl...

This meme is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish . To see more favourite book-to-movie adaptations, head over there to see which movies the other participants have nominated. I am going to cheat and interpret ‘movie’ as ‘film’, so I can include television adaptations. Oscar and Lucinda , from the book by Peter Carey. Apart from the changed ending it is an incredibly faithful adaptation, with every character perfectly cast. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo , from the book by Stieg Larsson. This one actually improves on the book, which is well plotted but badly written. Cold Comfort Farm , from the book by Stella Gibbons. Perfect casting and quite faithful to the original. High Fidelity , from the book by Nick Hornby. Moving the story to America didn’t hurt it one bit. Fried Green Tomatoes (at the Whistle Stop Café), from the book by Fannie Flagg. Perfect casting and faithful to the story. Pride and Prejudice from the book by Jane Austen, the latest BBC adaptation. Incredibly f...

The Top Ten Tuesdays meme is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish . For more lists of unforgettable love stories, head on over there and visit the other participating blogs. When faced with the challenge of coming up with my 10 favourite love stories from books, I sat down and thought about the love stories that have affected me, that I remember and that I like to read about over and over. To my surprise only two of them are from romance novels, or three if you think Jane Austen's books are first and foremost romances. These are today’s choices - they many change at any time. Robin and Marian from any number of retellings of the Robin Hood myth.Probably because it was among the first love stories I came across in a book. Odysseus and Penelope from the Greek myths. Anne and Gilbert from the Anne of Green Gables books. Classic "enemies become lovers" plot. Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth from Persuasion by Jane Austen.A classic "return to love" p...

The Top Ten Tuesdays meme is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Show your appreciation by clicking on this link and checking out some more book lists on the other participating blogs. This is a tough one, since I didn’t really read English at any kind of proficiency until my teens, so I really should list Icelandic books. However, few if any of my readers will have heard of any of them, so instead I will list books in English I wish I could have read as a kid. Some were available in translation, so theoretically I could have read them, while others were not. (Later I may draw up a list of children’s books written after I grew up which I would love to have read as a child). Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Such a wonderful children’s book. I hope it gets translated so Icelandic kids can enjoy it. Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. I loved the movie and liked the book and would have liked to have discovered it as a child. A Little Princess by Frances Hodg...

The Top Ten Tuesdays meme is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish . Show your appreciation by clicking on the link and checking out some more reading resolutions on the other participating blogs. This is actually more of an “I would like to finish” list than a resolution - I have stopped making those. Douglas Adams: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency . I like the Hitch-hiker’s Guide series, so I really should read this one and see if I like it as much. R. Broby-Johansen: Krop og klær . Illustrated costume history, in Danish. It’s a subject I am interested in and I have had the book for several years, but for some reason never read it. Charles Darwin: Voyage of the Beagle . Third attempt... Amelia B. Edwards: A Thousand Miles up the Nile . I need to finish this one. Neil Gaiman. Anansi Boys . Bought it soon after it came out and never read it, which is surprising because I like Gaiman's work. Gregory Maguire: Wicked . Got it for my birthday years ago but never manag...