Reading in Reykjavík

(never thought I'd find a way to use this word!)

"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

I read a total of 23 books in August, plus a handful of short stories (not listed). The majority were rereads, on the one hand Ngaio Marsh‘s Roderick Alleyn series, and on the other a bunch of Lucky Luke comics I have owned since I was in my teens. As for the rest, they included a classic novel, romantic suspense, romance, a Shakespeare play and a very interesting piece of non-fiction. The high points of the month‘s reading were the last two: Macbeth and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks . The latter is the result of impressive and determined research into an important medical and biological discovery about the provenance of which very little seems to have been known before the author started digging up information. It tells the story of HeLa , the oldest and still the most important line of immortal human cells used in medical research, the people connected with it and the discoveries those cells were instrumental in helping to make. It mixes up biography, autobiography, biology...