Reading in Reykjavík

I may have mentioned before that many Icelanders LOVE books. Not only do we buy them for ourselves, but we also love to give them as gifts. The market is small and therefore the one time it really pays to advertise books is the time of the year when you can give books to lots of people. In other words: Christmas. Don‘t get me wrong: Books do get advertised at other times, like in March/April/May when the 14-year olds go through their confirmations and in May/June when school graduations take place. The market at those times is however mostly for reference books, classic literature in fine bindings and expensive non-fiction books about subjects like photography, natural history or cooking, and the advertising is likewise mostly limited to these subjects. Books that are likely to sell well and are published in paperback at various times of the year, such as the latest by authors like Jo Nesbø or Lee Child, also get advertised, while some, especially translations of Harlequin rom...

My concession to Halloween There was no such thing as Halloween in Iceland when I was growing up. We celebrated (and still do) in a similar manner at carnival time - i.e. on Ash Wednesday - and demolished a piñata, although the piñatas we demolished were really wooden barrels that took a lot of whacking before they broke, and there was not a prize inside but rather one was presented afterwards to the person who dealt the death blow to the barrel. This is called "beating the cat out of the barrel" and legend has it that there once used to be an actual dead cat inside the barrel. It is actually quite a Halloween-like tradition if you think about it. Later, when I went away to boarding school in Akureyri, I became familiar with the tradition of dressing up and going singing from door to door in the shopping district to get candy on Ash Wednesday, sort of like trick-or-treating in the USA, only with singing and no trickery. I think, although I can't be absolutely su...