Reading in Reykjavík

Yet another privileged male rants about women and their love of romance novels , apparently based on reading two books, and promptly gets taken down by clever, articulate women people . By the way, if anything, some of the responses in the comment section beneath the original article are even better than the SMTB post and the accompanying comments (albeit not as stingingly funny). (By the way, I have a low opinion of Fifty Shades of Grey , but I wouldn't dream of saying anything negative about the people who enjoy it. What you enjoy is not what you are - if it was, I'd have been diagnosed with dissociative personality disorder years ago).

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...

I sit here watching the Eurovision Song Contest as a write this. The Russian twin sisters are on, singing a typical Eurovision song, not too bad but hardly memorable, but it will be interesting to see how they fare when it comes to the voting because Russia isn‘t exactly popular in Europe right now. But now it‘s time for the books. I read 27 of them in April. I would have loved to make it 30 – a book per day – but that‘s the way it goes. The reason I was able to read so much was a that I took 6 days of vacation time I had left over from last summer and combined them with the Easter holidays and the first day of summer (third Thursday in April and a bank holiday in Iceland). With three weekends included it made 16 days of no work which, however, just happened to coincide with bad weather. I think it rained just about every day, so I mostly stayed in and read. The books were a mixed bag: some romance, some memoirs/biography, crime, a literary novel, travel, articles/essays, cooking...