Reading in Reykjavík

I quite forgot to write a wrap-up post for this challenge, but here it is now. I joined the Bibliomaniac level, with the aim to read 12 books. It has been fun, and I wish there had been an even higher level, because it was so easy that I finished it in August. I don't really have much else to say about this challenge, so I will let my reviews of the books speak for themselves: The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk (also part of the Global Reading Challenge) Sullivan’s Woman by Nora Roberts Expletives Deleted: Selected writings by Angela Carter The Hours by Michael Cunningham The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton Stevenson under the Palm Trees by Alberto Manguel The Princeton Murders by Ann Waldron Maps & Legends: Reading and writing along the borderlands by Michael Chabon A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a book addict by John Baxter Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley So Many Books, So Little Time by Sara Nelson The Classic Era of Crime Fiction by Peter Haini...

This is the 12th and final book I read as part of the Bibliophilic Books Challenge . Year published: 2002 Genre: Literary history; non-fiction Despite the unfortunate error I mentioned in an earlier post, this book gives a great overview of the roots and development of the crime genre. Haining clearly loved the subject and unfolds it in 8 chapters, each of which covers a particular sub-genre and era of crime literature and the authors who developed these genres into what they are today. He begins with the penny bloods , which gave readers in the 19th century cheap chills and thrills, goes on to discuss the stories of crime-fighters and early detective stories which gave rise to Sherlock Holmes and his rivals, which led to the development of the tough Private Eye stories that led to hard-boiled crime stories and the crime noir novels, and ends with spy novels. The book is written in a matter-of-fact informative style without being dry, covers a large number of authors and book...

"Explaining the moment of connection between a reader and a book to someone who‘s never experienced it is like trying to explain sex to a virgin." Sara Nelson on the phenomenon when a reader gets sucked into the book. Bibliophilic book number 11. Only one to go. Not that I‘m counting ;-) Year published: 2003 Genre: Memoir At the end of 2001, Sara Nelson decided to set herself a reading challenge, a simple book-a-week affair for one year, and keep a diary about it. The result was this book, which most readers should be able to, on some level, to enjoy. Although she is a seasoned, professional writer of book reviews, this is not a collection of reviews or even of literary theory or analysis, but more of a meditation on and a revelling in different aspects of reading, interspersed with snippets of information about whichever book she was reading at the time each essay was written. She covers issues most readers will be familiar with, like trying to turn a non-reader in...

This makes 10 books in the Bibliophilic Books Challenge, which means I have only 2 to go. Year published: 2002 Genre: Biography, non-fiction Charles Dickens isn’t so much a biography as an attempt by one author to understand and interpret another. Dickens’s adult life is painted in the broadest of strokes, with plenty of speculation about the effects of his public and personal life on his work, extrapolated from known facts, with some excursions into psychoanalysis and literary theory. This is a nice introduction to Dickens as a person, giving just enough information about him to either satisfy a reader’s curiosity to know a little bit about the man behind the novels, or to serve as an amuse-bouche - a little something to awaken and prepare the taste buds for further reading. It is well-written and short enough to make for light reading, but it’s really neither one thing or another, being unable to decide between being a portrait, a biography, or an analysis. 2+ stars.

My 9th book in the Bibliophilic Book Challenge, and one that doesn’t need any justification as to why it’s bibliophilic. Genre: Memoir Year of publication: 2002 I didn’t know who John Baxter was when I picked up this book in the bibliobooks section of the Icelandic national library and I would never even have noticed the book, let alone given it a second glance, had it been filed in the biographies. But someone was inspired enough to put it in the section reserved for books about books, which is usually the first shelf I gravitate towards when I visit that particular library. After reading it I still don’t know much about John Baxter, except that he is an Australian-born dedicated bibliophile and book collector who has, through his career as an entertainment journalist, film critic, biographer and fiction writer, been lucky enough to meet and in some instances befriend a number of book people, literary figures and authors, sometimes while in hot pursuit of their signature for...

...when the novel is first published, it may seem to be a true and faithful rendering of the life of the time it is looking back to, but almost every historical novel dates very quickly and soon comes to epitomize its own period more than the period in which it is set. On A Tale of Two Cities This makes me wonder what the bodice-rippers that were so popular back in the 1970's and 80's will tell the readers of the future about that era? Smiley continues a little later: For all the research that goes into it, and for all the weight it seems to have, the historical novel is one of the most ephemeral genres and reveals most clearly an author's intellectual and imaginative limitations. On A Tale of Two Cities This book is more of a portrait than a biography of Dickens and only traces his life in broad sketches, instead trying to show this complex man to the modern reader, trace how his work developed and perhaps increase our understanding of what made him such a great w...

I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature. From the essay “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the modern short story” Year published: 2008 Genre: Literary essays This is a collection of 16 interconnected essays (and a 17th supplementary essay) on literature, reading, writing and the genesis of three of Chabon’s novels. It starts with a proposition to expand the definition of entertainment (see the beginning paragraphs of the opening essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights”, that I already posted) and goes on to explore aspects of popular culture like short story writing, genre fiction and comic books, and their influence on Chabon and other authors. He is unapologetic, albeit sometimes a bit defensive, about his enjoyment of genre literature, and makes the same argument as I have sometimes tried to make about genre fiction being unfai...

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives of a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages in regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation. It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life’s lambency in a halogen glare. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you—bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.           But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men...

Here is the seventh book I read for the Bibliophilic Books Challenge , which puts me just past the halfway point of the Bibliomaniac level. This book fits into the challenge in several ways: The main sleuth is a journalist, and her writing course is featured and the classes described several times; the other teachers are writing or have written books (one is a world-famous author) - two even have motives for murder related to their books; and the students are writing assignments that are part of what drives a section of the story. Genre: Mystery Year of publication: 2003 No. in series: 1 Series detective: McLeod Dulane Type of mystery: Murder, cosy Type of investigator: A, journalist and lecturer in non-fiction writing at Princeton University Setting & time: Princeton University campus, New Jersey, USA Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist McLeod Dulane is thrilled to be given a chance to teach journalistic writing at Princeton University, but her enthusiasm wanes so...

Here is another Bibliophilic Book challenge book (my sixth), this one a novel about a famous author. In the story, he is writing his final book, Weir of Hermiston (although it is never mentioned by title). Year published: 2004 Genre: Novel Setting & time: Samoa, 1894 Possible S-P-O-I-L-E-R-S ahead. At sunset one day Robert Louis Stevenson meets Mr. Baker, a sinister Scottish missionary, on the beach below his house on Samoa. This meeting is the prelude to a nasty spate of violence that causes a stir in Stevenson’s mind. The writing is evocative and lovely. The story reworks of some of Stevenson’s own themes, especially those of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , causing the reader some unease because of the suggestion that perhaps Mr. Baker is really Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde, or making them wonder if perhaps the whole story is a figment of Stevenson’s fevered imagination. I think I have mentioned before that I am not particularly fond of authors taking real pe...

This book, the 5th I read for the challenge, fits into the Bibliophilic challenge by virtue of the whole story turning on books, reading and literacy. The camel bookmobile, by the way, is a real phenomenon: Year published: 2007 Genre: Novel Setting & time: (mostly) a small village in Kenya, 2003. An American librarian goes to Kenya to help start up a mobile library, carried on camel-back, to bring books to remote villages out in the bush. One day two books are not returned in a tiny nomadic settlement, Mididima, and knowing that unless they are returned the library will stop going to that particular village, the American goes alone to the village to try to persuade the borrower to return them. The village is in conflict about the library: some value it for the promise of literacy and window on the outside world it has brought to the village, while others fear that it heralds the destruction of the tribe’s culture. All of them, however, want to return the missing books because i...

This book perfectly fits the Bibliophilic Books challenge . Not only is one of the characters preoccupied with reading a novel, but another character is busy writing the same novel, and the third main character is preparing a party to honour a writer friend who has won a literary award. Year published: 1998 Genre: Novel Setting & time: New York, end of the 20th century; London, 1923; Los Angeles, 1949. The lives of three women, separated from each other by decades, are intertwined and mirrored by each other, as each goes about her business on a single day. Clarissa, nick-named Mrs. Dalloway by the friend she is preparing a party for, goes out to buy flowers; Virginia Woolf, in a London suburb, is living in fear of the return of her migraines, writing Mrs. Dalloway and longing to move back into the city; and Laura Brown, in L.A., is straining against the ordinariness of her life, reading Mrs. Dalloway and trying to be a good wife and mother but wanting something else. The narra...

I don’t really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely, sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven’t seen anybody all day. From the Introduction . Year published: 1992 Genre: Literary criticism and analysis This is my third entry in the Bibliophilic Books Challenge . This volume of selected pieces of literary criticism and analysis by Angela Carter contains essays and reviews selected by her. They are not presented chronologically, so you don’t get much of a sense of development of writing style or ideas, but rather of unity of theme, genre or place. Carter writes from a personal point of view in many of these pieces, not trying to be objective, sometimes not even bothering to be coy or polite about saying she thinks something sucks, but almost always giving good reasons why. She is at her most venomous in two pieces mentioning cooking doyenne...

A short passage from the author's Introduction: ...I like to write about writers who give me pleasure. Pleasure has always had a bad press in Britain. I'm all for pleasure, too. I wish there was more of it around. I also like to argue. A day without an argument is like an egg without salt. This bodes extremely well for this collection of Angela Carter's literary reviews.

This is my second book in the Bibliophilic Books Challenge . It qualifies because it features a writer as the heroine. Her writing is very important to her and the narrative frequently shows her writing, working out scenes or joking about her manuscript and its journey from publisher to publisher. Technically speaking, it could go in the Global Challenge as well, but I am trying to read all new (to me) authors in that one, so I’m not counting it in. Year published: 1984 Genre: Romance Setting & time: San Francisco, contemporary (modern timeless) Struggling writer Cassidy St. John can’t keep any job for long, so being offered a steady one sitting for celebrated painter Colin Sullivan is a blessing... to begin with. Colin is a hard taskmaster, egotistical, passionate and extremely sexy and it isn’t long before Cassidy has fallen in love with him. But Colin is known for not sticking to any one woman for long, and Cassidy is not the kind of woman who likes being discarded like yest...

Part of Dorte’s Global Reading Challenge that I am participating in was to discover a new author or read a book from a country or state on your own continent that you have not read before. With this book I have done both. I have also managed to kill two birds with one stone by combining both outside challenges I am participating in, the Global challenge and the Bibliophilic Book challenge ). Year published: 1979 (English translation: 1990, by Victoria Holbrook) Genre: Historical novel Setting & time: (mostly) Turkey, 17 century. The former imperial astrologer to the Sultan of Turkey tells the story of two men, one an enslaved Venetian and the other his Turkish master, who, over their long acquaintance, come to know each other almost better than they know themselves. This is an interesting novel, a historical tale of an unhealthy relationship of love and loathing between two men who cannot part from each other, one because he is the other’s slave and fears punishment for trying ...

This one is by Lesley of the A Life in Books blog. The 2010 Bibliophilic Books Challenge is simply to read a given number of bibliobooks during the year 2010. Since I generally read a number of bibliobooks each year anyway, I will be bold and join the Bibliomaniac part of the challenge, which is to read twelve books that have to do with books or reading, in the course of 2010. As with the Global Reading Challenge (see previous post), I will try to read as many books as possible from my TBR stack and thus combine both these outside challenges with by own TBR challenge .