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.

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...

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

Reading in Reykjavík

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