Reading in Reykjavík

Read a biography or autobiography of someone you admire or are curious to know more about. That concludes the Wednesday reading experiences/suggestions. I will not be continuing this feature in 2010.

Read a sequel/prequel or rewrite of a famous novel that features some of the same characters but is written by a different author. This could be, for example, a modernisation of a famous novel such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as retold in Kate Fenton’s Vanity and Vexation or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre retold as science fiction in Sharon Shinn’s Jenna Starborn . Examples of sequels and prequels (and spin-offs) include all of Jane Austen’s books (authors include Emma Tennant and Joan Aiken) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books (authors include Laurie L. King and Nicholas Meyer). Additionally, you can find thousands of (mostly unauthorised) short stories and some novels that have only been published on-line, written by fans (and not all of it is slash fiction ). Most of it is not terribly good, but if you search hard you can find some gems among the rubble. Some questions to consider: How did you feel about reading about characters you knew and loved from the origi...

Celebrate the Christmas season with a holiday-themed read. Any one of Charles Dickens’s Christmas novels will serve to get you in the mood. Start with A Christmas Carol , then move on to The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth . I leave it up to you whether you also read the less popular The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain . Fannie Flagg’s A Redbird Christmas is funny and somewhat sentimental, but many of us like sentimentality around Chrismas. Connie Willis has an excellent fantasy and science fiction themed collection titled Miracle and other Christmas Stories . For younger readers J.R.R. Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters is both heartwarming and funny and while Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! may have been written and drawn for children many adults find it enjoyable as well. Christmas probably wouldn’t be complete for many Americans without "A Visit from St. Nicholas", better known as "The Night Before Christmas". Thi...

This should of course have been published on the 9th, but I thought I had it on automatic posting and didn't even check. So here it is now, none the worse for being a little late: Choose a major literary award, local or international, and read some books that have been given the award. It can be any kind of award, not just literary fiction. It could, for example, be for crime writing, romance, travel writing or science, etc. Did you agree that it should have won the award? For a fairer comparison, you could also read the books that were nominated alongside the winner and decide which one you like best and why.

If you have a favourite genre and a favourite sub-genre within that genre (say historical mysteries or paranormal romances), choose a different sub-genre you are less familiar with and try that (e.g. forensic mysteries or Amish romance). I find I often stick to a comfort zone in my choice of reading materials, concentrating on one or two particular sub-genres and tending to ignore the others, but my original 52 books challenge had me reading out of my comfort zone and I have tried to continue that practice. It has introduced me to authors, genres and sub-genres I might otherwise never have discovered.

Read some travel tales, real or fictional. If you’re wondering where to start, you can start by browsing through my travel book reviews. Then, you can check out the Wikipedia article on the subject.

Get to know the roots of your favourite literary genre. There exist histories of most of the popular genres, and a good librarian can recommend one to you.

Read some of Jules Verne's books. I have a particular fondness for A Journey to the Center of the Earth , because it partly takes place in Iceland, and for Around the World in Eighty Days , which is partly responsible for my love of travelling.

Discover the literature of a foreign country you are not much familiar with. I plan to see if I can find some English translations of Indian writers while I am in India, because my reading of Indian literature consists of a prose retelling of the stories told in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and a handful of books by Indian women writers who write in English*. When this posts (I am posting this ahead of time) I should have finished reading a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is part of the Mahabharata. *Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Anita Desai.

Read an epistolatory novel. These are novels written as a series of documents, e.g. letters or e-mails, blog entries, historical documents, reports, reviews, excerpts from books, newspaper clippings and diary entries. Basically anything that is traditionally written or typed, used without any connecting passages to form a narrative. It enables the author to let the characters (or a chosen number of characters) express themselves directly without having a narrator tell the story. I have already recommended reading fictional diaries, which form part of the epistolatory genre, so a different epistolatory form is recommended. Here are some that I have enjoyed: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Written as a series of accounts of the theft of a precious stone, using different styles and voices. Letters to Alice, Upon first reading Jane Austen by Fay Weldon. What the title says, plus much more besides. Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos. A novel told entirely in letters between the c...

Challenge your prejudices some more: Read a book that you have panned or derided without actually having read it. Some frequently panned books that come to mind include novels by Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, Nicholas Sparks and Danielle Steel. Others include such famous and/or infamous works of the more distant past, like philosophical and religious writings of all ages and eras, Marx’s Communist Manifesto , Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake , and anything by the Marquis de Sade. Of course you should choose one that you have prejudices about. Whether your prejudices are rebuffed or confirmed, you will at least now be able to pan or praise the book in question without hypocrisy.

Read THAT book. You know the one I mean: the one every one of your friends has read, or the one you promised someone you would read, or the one that you want to have read but don’t particularly want to read , or the one that you have desperately wanted to read just about for ever but haven’t because it daunts you because of its size or its reputation. THAT book can be just about any book ranging from Twilight to War and Peace , so I would love to hear what you would choose and for which of the above reasons. -- When I have finished my current reading challenges I am planning to tackle a tome that is the embodiment of THAT book for many people: James Joyce's Ulysses . I want to do this to challenge my prejudices about Joyce, whose short stories were apt to put me to sleep when I was studying him in modern literature at college. It is also one of those books that any literary snob worth her salt wants to have read, and I dearly want to be able, when said snobs start talking about ...

Now that you have become firmly familiar with the diary form, both in reality and fiction, why not try keeping one for a while? This may look like a writing assignment at first sight, but I’m getting to the reading part: Read your journal at the end of the journalling period, and again in 5, 10 or 20 years time. Annotate it if you feel like it. Alternative suggestion: If you are a regular journal/diary writer, have you ever read your old ones? It can be like meeting a total stranger who is sort of familiar, but sort of not, and it’s interesting to read about how you saw or reacted to something back then versus the way you see or remember it in retrospective. I have occasionally dipped into my travel journals from years past, and have often been surprised at what I have found in them. I have been amazed by the prejudices I held, the opinions I had, the way I handled a situation, how immature I was. I still cringe every now and then when I take one of these nostalgia trips, but even tho...

Now that you have read a real diary, try a fictional one. Last Wednesday I recommended a real diary because it helps to be familiar with the non-fiction diary form when reading fictional diaries. In fiction the diary form has been used to good effect in parody and for satire, but also for more innocent humour. It has also been used in dead earnest in fiction. It is one of the forms which epistolatory novels take, a sort of monologue where the reader takes on the role of the narrator's confessor. Here are some that I can recommend: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend. These are ostensibly written for teenagers, but can be enjoyed by adults as well. I have not read the sequels, but I do own them and plan to read them. Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding. Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison. Written for teenage girls, but quite enjoyable. Have not read any of the sequels, but expect them to...

Read a published diary/journal or a collection of excerpts from diaries/journals. Diaries can be an excellent way of seeing into someone’s mind and also to find out little things about daily life in the past that can hardly be found anywhere else. For this reason historians find diaries to be an excellent source of research material. They also make good material for biographers. While the diaries and journals of famous people may be most interesting to the general public in the authors’ life time or recently after their death, in the long run it is often the diaries of ordinary people like Anne Frank and Samuel Pepys that end up being much more fascinating. While parts of Frank’s diary were written with the view of later publication, Pepys probably never intended his diaries for publication and so he is more candid and outspoken than he might otherwise have been. I am currently reading The Faber Book of Diaries , a collection of interesting diary entries chosen and edited by Simon Bret...

Read a graphic novel. If you are not already a fan of comic strips and/or comic books, you might be surprised to find just how sophisticated they can be. Graphic novels tell a story in graphic form, using the images and minimal text style of comics to convey what a regular novel does in words alone. The term is used about stories too long to publish in one single edition of a comics magazine, and describes both works originally published in book form and works originally published in episodic form in comics magazines and later collected into book form. There is some debate as to the exact definition of a graphic novel, but for the purpose of this blog post let’s define a graphic novel as a book containg a single long story or a collection of shorts stories with a common theme or setting, told in graphic form. I can personally recommend: By Neil Gaiman and various artists: The Sandman series The Books of Magic The Death series (spin-off from Sandman) Stardust (also a traditional novel ...

Read a bibliobook. A bibliobook is a book that is about or prominently features books and/or book people, and can include both fiction and non fiction. Bibliobooks are perhaps the best proof of the enduring love people have for books and reading. Some suggestions: Non-fiction: 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. Memoir about her long-lasting intercontinental relationship with a book shop and its staff. There is a charming movie starring Anne Bancroft as Hanff. At Home with Books by Estelle Ellis & Caroline Seebohm, photographs by Christopher Simon Sykes. Here’s an excerpt from my review of it: “ …a gorgeous, big book with oodles of pictures and chapters on various millionaires, aristocrats, collectors and designers and their libraries, interspersed with advice on how to care for and display books. The libraries range from small and cosy to huge and imposing, but all the owners are real bibliophiles who read their books and obviously love them. ... Cool coffee table book. ” Liv...

Try some chick-lit or the male equivalent: lad-lit. If you’re a woman who already reads chick-lit, give lad-lit a try, and vice versa. If you are unfamiliar with either: Chick-lit is a term used for a specific sub-genre of women's fiction (i.e. books written for and marketed to women). It separates itself from romance fiction in that the main focus is not on romantic relationships, although they may be (and usually are) included, but equally on the female protagonist’s relationships with family, friends and co-workers, and on their careers and other aspects of their lives. These novels are generally light-hearted and humorous and the females portrayed in them tend to be in their 20s or 30s, are generally single, building a career (often in some seemingly glamorous profession like fashion or publishing), and are often obsessed with career-building and fond of shopping. Some well-known titles include Bridget’s Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisber...

Read some short stories or novellas and compare the form with that of a novel. The short story has been called the novel’s little sister, which could be taken to imply that it is an easier form than the novel, but in fact a good short story is actually just as hard to write as a novel, possibly harder. In a novel, you have plenty of text to say what you want to say, but in a short story you can only say so much if you want it to stay short and not turn into a novella or even a novel. Here is a blog about just such a challenge .

Subscribe to a magazine for one year and read every issue from cover to cover. I did this for the several years when I subscribed to National Geographic, and then to Saveur, and found it very rewarding. I recommend something that has substantial and informative articles and contains more articles than advertisments.