Reading in Reykjavík

I spent a considerable time looking for interior and exterior photos of a house or houses to accompany this description, but I finally gave up. And no wonder:         It was an astonishing building. A Victorian architect, fortified and encouraged by the Ancred of his day, had pulled down a Queen Anne house and, from its rubble, caused to rise up a sublimation of his most exotic day-dreams. To no one style or period did Ancreton adhere. Its façade bulged impartially with Norman, Gothic, Baroque and Rococo excrescences. Turrets sprouted like wens from every corner. Towers rose up from a multiplicity of battlements. Arrow slits peered furtively at exopthalmic bay-windows, and out of a kaleidoscope field of tiles rose a forest of variegated chimney-stacks. The whole was presented, not against the sky, but against a dense forest of evergreen trees, for behind Ancreton crest rose another and steeper hillside, richly planted in conifers. Perhaps the imag...

"The library opened out of the smoking-room. It had an air of being the most used room in the house, and indeed it was here that Jonathan could generally be found amid a company of books that bore witness to generations of rather freakish taste and to the money by which such taste could be gratified. Jonathan had added lavishly to the collection. His books ranged oddly from translations of Turkish and Persian verse to the works of the most inscrutable of the moderns and text-books on criminology and police detection. He had a magpie taste in reading, but it was steadied by a constancy of devotion to the Elizabethans." From Death and the Dancing Footman by Ngaio Marsh

The opening paragraph of the book I'm about to start reading looks very promising: Gissing lived alone (except for his Japanese butler) in a little house in the country, in that woodland suburb region called the Canine Estates. He lived comfortably and thoughtfully, as bachelors often do. He came of a respectable family, who had always conducted themselves calmly and without too much argument. They had bequeathed him just enough income to live on cheerfully, without display but without having to do addition and subtraction at the end of the month and then tear up the paper lest Fuji (the butler) should see it. From Where the Blue Begins , by Christopher Morley

This conversation between the rigidly-in-control-at-all-times heroine and her friend takes place after the hero has thoroughly kissed the heroine before they actually get together, seriously confusing her: “I was wearing the Back-Off Cloak.” “What?” “I’m not stupid. He made a little move in the kitchen. Actually, he makes little moves every time I run into him, which is disconcerting, but I can handle it. So when I walked him to the door, I thought he might get ideas.” Laurel’s eyes widened. “You swirled on the Back-Off Cloak? The famed shield that repels men of all ages, creeds, and political affiliations?” Yes.” “Yet he was not repelled. He’s immune.” She gave Parker a slap on the arm. “He may be the only creature of his kind.” Nora Roberts, Happy Ever After

„He watched pleasure turn her eyes to blue crystals, tasted her moan as he crushed his mouth to hers.“   Nora Roberts, Savor the Moment . Please tell me what is so sexy about crystals for eyes, even if they are blue? They are cold and hard and while they are pretty to look at, they are hardly sexy. That is an image that belongs more in a horror story than a romance novel."The Girl With the Crystal Eyes", anyone?

A lovely quotation from Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes   by Robert Louis Stevenson: "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. "

"Calcutta takes its name from [Kalikata], which in turn was named after the black Hindu goddess Kali. The dreadful Kali is the wife of Shiva, and is portrayed as a bloodthirsty, axe-wielding psychopath, dripping in blood, with the heads of her victims hanging on string around her neck. In normal circumstances the likes of Kali would be taken in for police questioning. But in Calcutta she is revered as the city's patron goddess. The similarly evil appearance of Calcutta must be more than mere coincidence. The forces of Hindu destiny at work again?" Peter Holt, from In Clive's Footsteps , reprinted in Simon Winchester's Calcutta .

I came across this funny description of illusions getting shattered in Louisa May Alcott's  Little Women that I want to share: Miss Norton had the entree into most society, which Jo would have had no chance of seeing but for her. The solitary woman felt an interest in the ambitious girl, and kindly conferred many favors of this sort both on Jo and the Professor. She took them with her one night to a select symposium, held in honor of several celebrities. Jo went prepared to bow down and adore the mighty ones whom she had worshiped with youthful enthusiasm afar off. But her reverence for genius received a severe shock that night, and it took her some time to recover from the discovery that the great creatures were only men and women after all. Imagine her dismay, on stealing a glance of timid admiration at the poet whose lines suggested an ethereal being fed on 'spirit, fire, and dew', to behold him devouring his supper with an ardor which flushed his intellectual count...

I think the following may just be the most unromantic proposal of marriage scene I have read:      'So Mrs Van Hopper has had enough of Monte Carlo,' he said, 'and now she wants to go home. So do I. She to New York and I to Manderley. Which would you prefer? You can take your choice.'      'Don't make a joke about it; it's unfair,' I said; 'and I think I had better see about those tickets, and say goodbye now.'      'If you think I'm one of the people who try to be funny at breakfast you're wrong,' he said. 'I'm invariably ill-tempered in the early morning. I repeat to you, the choice is open to you. Either you go to America with Mrs Van Hopper or you come home to Manderley with me.'      'Do you mean you want a secretary or something?'      'No, I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool.' From Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. It's no wonder she had to ask what he meant . And in case ...

"Luckily, I have trained myself over the years never to go anywhere without something to read, just in case someone turns up late, the meeting ends early, or I'm inadvertently imprisoned for thirty-five-years and put into solitary confinement. I'm actually quite worried about those people you see on long train journeys with nothing to read, just staring blankly into the middle distance. What the hell is going on in their heads, then? Perhaps they've got excellent memories, and they‘re just remembering a particularly good book they once read, which saves them having to carry one round. Because there‘s a danger in carrying a book round: you might leave it somewhere before you've finished it. I once left my copy if Get Shorty in the back of a drunken farmer‘s Jeep in Costa Rica when I was only two-thirds of the way through, and it completely ruined the trip. The rainforest is a much duller place without Elmore Leonard." From McCarthy's Bar by Pete McCarthy...

...it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all."  Walter Hartright describing Miss Fairlie's former governess, in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck al all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides , the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead. From We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. A very promising first sentence, don't you think?

I am reading Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary by M.R. James during my lunch hours and coffee breaks at work, and I came across this funny and somewhat acid quotation which reminded me of similar sentiments expressed by numerous writers, especially those writing in and of the 18th and 19th centuries: Sir Richard was a pestilent innovator, it is certain. Before his time the Hall had been a fine block of the mellowest red brick; but Sir Richard had travelled in Italy and become infected with the Italian taste, and, having more money than his predecessors, he determined to leave an Italian palace where he had found an English house. So stucco and ashlar masked the brick; some indifferent Roman marbles were planted about in the entrance-hall and gardens; a reproduction of the Sibyl's temple at Tivoli was erected on the opposite bank of the mere; and Castringham took on an entirely new, and, I must say, a less engaging, aspect. But it was much admired, and served as a model to a good many...

A suspected con-man starts up a literary society to honour two little-known authors of the Edwardian era, but gets murdered. Among the suspects are a number of fans of the authors and some literary poseurs out to profit from their reputations. Here the two main investigators are discussing the murder: “Maybe,” said Mike Oddie, as they walked back to the car, “we shouldn’t be concentrating too much on the people at the Conference. Maybe we should be asking ’cui bono’ ?” “And what does that mean?” asked Charlie. “It means ‘Who gets his hands on the loot?’” “I always heard that Latin was an economical language.” “It is. Multum in parvo . ‘A lot in a little.’” “It’s like being sidekick to Lord Peter Wimsey,” Charlie complained.

Woody Allen once said that the advantage of bisexuality is that it doubles your chances of finding a date on a Saturday night. Having a bifurcated reading brain—one part that likes „junk“ and one that reveres „literature“—is the same kind of satisfying. You don‘t have to be any one thing and you don‘t have to think any one way. And should you happen upon different kinds of people in different situations, your pool of conversation topics is twice as deep. From the chapter „Double-booked“

Meyer to McGee, when urged by the latter to take a run along the beach for exercise: "Would that I could. When the beach people see you running, they know at a glance that it is exercise. There you are, all sinew and brown hide, and you wear that earnest, dumb, strained expression of the old jock keeping in shape. You have the style. Knees high, arms swinging just right, head up. But suppose I cam running down this beach? They would look at me, and then look again. I look so little like a runner or a jock that the only possible guess as to what would make me run is terror. So they look way down the beach to see what is chasing me. They can't see anything, but to be on the safe side, they start walking swiftly in the same direction I'm running. First just a few, then a dozen, then a score. All going faster and faster. Looking back. Breaking into a run. And soon you would have two or three thousand people thundering along the beach, eyes popping out of the sockets, cords i...

...when the novel is first published, it may seem to be a true and faithful rendering of the life of the time it is looking back to, but almost every historical novel dates very quickly and soon comes to epitomize its own period more than the period in which it is set. On A Tale of Two Cities This makes me wonder what the bodice-rippers that were so popular back in the 1970's and 80's will tell the readers of the future about that era? Smiley continues a little later: For all the research that goes into it, and for all the weight it seems to have, the historical novel is one of the most ephemeral genres and reveals most clearly an author's intellectual and imaginative limitations. On A Tale of Two Cities This book is more of a portrait than a biography of Dickens and only traces his life in broad sketches, instead trying to show this complex man to the modern reader, trace how his work developed and perhaps increase our understanding of what made him such a great w...

I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature. From the essay “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the modern short story” Year published: 2008 Genre: Literary essays This is a collection of 16 interconnected essays (and a 17th supplementary essay) on literature, reading, writing and the genesis of three of Chabon’s novels. It starts with a proposition to expand the definition of entertainment (see the beginning paragraphs of the opening essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights”, that I already posted) and goes on to explore aspects of popular culture like short story writing, genre fiction and comic books, and their influence on Chabon and other authors. He is unapologetic, albeit sometimes a bit defensive, about his enjoyment of genre literature, and makes the same argument as I have sometimes tried to make about genre fiction being unfai...

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives of a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages in regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation. It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life’s lambency in a halogen glare. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you—bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.           But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men...

It was the dark hour before dawn. Rain fell in a ceaseless torrent upon the sodden clifftops and smashed straight as stair rods onto the churning, while-flecked sea beneath. Great waves rose in the Channel and surged around St. Catherine's Point to curl and break upon the tagged rocks in a thundering, relentless roll, sending white spray into the darkness. From the prologue to The Least Likely Bride by Jane Feather. This is the last in a trilogy of historical romances that take place during the English civil war. I obtained the first two a couple of years ago and have already read them (another 2 books off the TBR list - yay!), but only got the third a couple of months ago.