Reading in Reykjavík

Here is my contribution to this week's Weekly Geeks : The future. I consider myself to be open-minded when it comes to the format of the books I read. Give me audio books, pop-up books, books with upside-down, spiraling or variable text, books like The Dictionary of the Kzars which you read out of order of the pages, or books like the Griffin and Sabine trilogy which are told in a series of letters and postcards, some of which are removable or stuffed inside envelopes – if it can be read or listened to, I’ll read it or listen to it as long as the subject interests me. The immediate past. E-books are no exception. I have been reading them on my computer since I discovered Project Gutenberg way back in the mists of the 20th century and I knew that with the advent of portable computers it would only be a matter of time until someone came up with a dedicated device for reading books on a screen. As a matter of fact it surprised me that it didn’t happen sooner. Reading book...

This is a Weekly Geeks post. I didn’t write it specifically as such, but I had it on hand and it fit one of the two themes for this week. Dear Reader: Are there any subjects or themes or sub-genres you avoid reading about in a literary genre you otherwise like? I have a few of these red flag subjects, and one of them is pirates, specifically pirate protagonists. Since there is actually a pirate sub-genre in the historical romance genre, which I periodically turn to when I get tired of reading mysteries and non-fiction, I come across them often. I enjoy reading about the lives of real pirates, and will pick up a book where pirates are the bad guys without a second thought, but to me pirates and privateers always invoke the image of violent murderers and robbers and therefore I have never been able to suspend my disbelief sufficiently in order to enjoy a tale in which a pirate is the hero. I have yet to come across a pirate protagonist in a story where the piracy is neither prett...

The Weekly Geeks blogging prompt is a juicy one this week: “Do you have a best list? a worst list? Perhaps a why-oh-why list? Which movies (based on books) would you recommend most? Do you always compare the book and the movie? Or are you able to enjoy each separately? Does a film have to be faithful to the book to be good? Are there any films that you like better than the book? Has a movie ever inspired you to pick up the book? Are there any books that you'd love to see as a movie? Do you have a music playlist--soundtrack--for a book?” I already did the “best” list as a Top Ten Tuesday meme , but this happens to be a subject I can talk about for hours, because it is part of my field of study (translation). As a matter of fact, I considered writing my thesis about book-to-film adaptations as translation. Translation isn’t just the rendering of a text in one language into an equivalent text in another language. Translation studies also cover interpretation of the spoken wor...

This is the first time I participate in a Weekly Geeks theme.This week it's a meme: Tell us ten things about you with regard to books and reading. Let your imagination run wild!  Here goes:  I collect bookmarks and I match them to the books I read. I have never read 40% of my books. That’s not counting books that are not meant to be read from cover to cover.  I read, on average, about 160 books a year. Generally only one or two will have been published in that year. Since the year 2000 I have cut my rereading from about half of all the books I read in a year down to fewer than 10. About 70% of my books were bought second hand. I have about 150 cookbooks and regularly use 3 of them. I am usually reading 4+ books at a time. When I was a child and young teen, I would go deaf when I was reading. I would love to own an e-reader. I think people who highlight words, dog ear or tear out pages, smoke or apply perfume while they are reading library books should be pu...