Reading in Reykjavík

 What's in a Name challenge category : The letter X in the title. Author : Nick Bantock. Full title : Alexandria: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Unfolds . Genre : Fantasy. Published :2002 Have you read this book? Why not leave a comment to tell me your thoughts about it? This is going to be somewhat of an unusual review, as the book is the middle volume of a trilogy that tells a single story (and links to another trilogy), and I have not read the previous book. However, I enjoyed it anyway and it fits into the What's in a Name challenge category of a book with the letter X in the title. The Griffin and Sabine trilogy garnered critical acclaim and praise for originality of presentation, as well as bestseller status when it first came out, and the author went on to write The Morning Star trilogy, which continued the story with new protagonists, followed by a final, 7th book that was published last year. I got my hands on the first ...

Although the What's in a Name reading challenge places no restriction on whether or not you own the books you read, I decided to try to use only books I already owned - preferably ones I had not already read - in fulfilling the challenge. This proved somewhat difficult, as it turned out that among my 700+ TBR books I only owned one book that had an item of cutlery in the title, and in the rest of my library there was just one other book with such a title. Its funny, considering I own over 200 cookbooks and you would think that I might own at least one with either spoon , fork , knife or chopsticks in the title.  As luck would have it, at first I could only find the book I had already read ( The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean), but when I began hunting for the book with the number in the title I had decided to read, I instead found the TBR cutlery book, which is a good thing because I hadn't planned to reread the other for another couple of years.  Have you r...

Have you read this book? Why not leave a comment to tell me how you liked it 😊 What's in a name challenge category: Compass direction. Author : Beryl Markham. Genre: Memoir. Originally published: 1942. Beryl Markham was a remarkable woman. She grew up on a farm in Kenya and learnt to train racehorses from her father, working at that profession intermittently throughout her life and becoming a respected trainer. She also learnt to fly and worked as a bush pilot in Africa and was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic ocean by airplane from east to west. West With the Night is a memoir about her life from childhood until after her record-setting flight, but could not be called a biography, because she only touches down here and there in her life and leaves much unsaid and unexplained. The writing is lovely, flowing, graceful and poetic, with a strong sense of nostalgia. The text gives an interesting insight into the lives of white expatriates in Kenya in the f...

Have you read this book? Why not leave a comment to tell me how you liked it? What's in a Name challenge category : Alliterative title. Author : Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz Sub-title : A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine. Genre : Biography/history. First published : 2014. The 19th century saw many revolutionary changes in medicine, and Thomas Dent Mütter was one of the men who contributed to these changes. While he was not the one who actually discovered bacteria, he did teach his students at Thomas Jefferson University that cleanliness was important to the well-being, and indeed the increased likelihood of survival, of patients, and he also stressed treating them with sympathy. It seems neither of these things could be taken for granted at the time, and there are some gruesome descriptions in the book of major surgeries, like amputations and reconstructive surgeries on conscious patients with little or no analgesia, and also of the inh...

Have you read this book? Why not leave a comment to tell me how you liked it 😊 What's in a Name challenge category : A building. Author : Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011). Genre : Fantasy, children's book. First published : 1986. I have long been a fan of the Hayao Miyazaki animated movie of Howl's Moving Castle , but I didn't become aware that it was based on a book until the author, Diana Wynne Jones, died in 2011. I had never heard of her until I saw her obituary in one of the British newspapers that mentioned her as one of the great fantasy authors, so I went to Wikipedia to find out more and discovered that she wrote Howl. I made a mental note to check out the book if I came across it, and then forgot about it until recently. I was browsing discussions on one of the online reading forums I participate in and found one about favourite books and authors that mentioned Jones and Howl. Since I was getting ready to place an order for some books with the Book ...

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant who travelled to to court of Kublai Khan in the 13th century and wrote a famous account of his visit, that was long considered to be more or less either made up or based on other travellers' accounts, but his account was in later years proven to be factual and probably mostly based on first hand experience. The book itself as an object is lovely. It is bound in fabric that looks like bright red silk, is printed on heavy, luxurious paper, has a bound-in bookmark, and is richly decorated with photographs, reproductions of paintings and other art, and background graphics that enrich the text. The designers have taken the decision to let the main text stand for itself instead of cluttering the pages by competing text, so the extensive notes on the text are provided as endnotes rather than footnotes, and the captions and credits for the photos and artwork are to be found at the back of the book as well. It is a sumptuous book, what we Icelanders c...

Genre: Urban fantasy, alternative reality, pastiche. I'm not going to give any plot summary here, since the plot hinges on so many secrets that I might give one away by accident.   Never the Bride builds on an interesting, if not exactly original premise: the old Gothic horror stories describe real historical events and there really are more things in Heaven and Earth (and Hell) than Horatio could have dreamt. The Bride of Frankenstein is real and lives in Whitby; the Invasion from Mars really happened; vampires walk the earth; and there are more spooky goings-on in the Goth capital of Britain than you can shake a stick at. Oh, and the book is full of cliches, just like the last two paragraphs. That's not to say it isn't entertaining, but there is something missing. The narrative is episodic rather than linear and while the stories that make up each episode do connect into a plot of sorts, there are so many loose ends flapping in the breeze that you can see not ...

Genre : Fantasy. Themes : Madness, amnesia, power struggles, magic, facing your fears. Warning : Possible triggers and definite spoilers. It was the cover of this book that first caught my eye. With a cover and title like this, I realised it must have something to do with Lewis Carroll's Alice, the girl who went to Wonderland. However, I have on several occasions read or tried to read spin-offs or "takes" on classic literature, and rarely have they been satisfying reads. So, I passed it up. However, I kept thinking about it and when I returned to the charity shop a couple of weeks later, it was still there, and so I bought it. It lay on the floor by my bed, silently screaming "read me!" for the whole time it took me to finish Rob Cowen's Common Ground , and once I was done with that book, I immediately picked up this one. The only reason I didn't pull an overnighter to finish it in one session was that I had a meeting in the morning and needed to b...

The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen describes the adventures of the Elizabeth of the title, on a holiday on the German island of Rügen, which is situated in the north-east corner of Germany and was already a popular holiday destination at the time of her visit. The author visited Rügen near the turn of the 19th century - the publication date is 1904, but in the opening chapter she writes as if this holiday had been taken some years earlier. At first it was to be a walking holiday, but she could not get any of her friends to accompany her, and so ended up taking a small horse carriage and driver, and a maid to serve as a chaperone, as her husband would not let her go alone. They circumambulated the island, following the shore as much as possible. This makes it a road trip story, a genre I love, both in fiction and non-fiction. I decided to read it because I have booked a fare on the Norröna ferry the European mainland and will be taking my car on a journey around Germany ne...