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 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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