Reading in Reykjavík

Full title: Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart Genre: Travel Subjects: Africa, the Congo river, Democratic Republic of the Congo, colonialism, history, adventure, exploitation, war. Reading challenge:   The 2016 Nonfiction Reading Challenge , hosted by The Introverted Reader Challenge tally : 3 books. “I was travelling through a country with more past than future, a place where the hands of the clock spin not forwards, but backwards.” This is the realisation that came to author Tim Butcher when he was about halfway through his foolhardy mission to follow the Congo river from it’s source all the way to the sea. Butcher had became fascinated with the Congo, especially the part played by Henry Morton Stanley in opening it up to European exploration and exploitation, and decided to follow Stanley’s route along the river as best he could. On the way he met all sorts of people: officials, both corrupt and otherwise, missionaries, aid workers and thei...

Genre: Adventure memoir. Subjects:  History, mountain-climbing, self-discovery, fear, friendship, death, survival. Reading challenge: The 2016 Nonfiction Reading Challenge , hosted by The Introverted Reader Challenge tally : 1 book. I read Simpson‘s best-seller, Touching the Void , a couple of years ago and enjoyed it immensely. Perhaps „enjoyed“ is not the right word, rather I found it a thrilling and yes, touching, account of the ability of the human spirit to not give up when all hope seems lost. (There was also a lot of bloodymindedness involved). This book is written with the same stylistic skill as Touching the Void , but suffers somewhat from being more of a series of loosely interconnected accounts of separate climbing expeditions and adventures, ending with an attempt to scale the Eiger that would be end up being tinged with tragedy. The thread that holds the book together is Simpson‘s growing realisation of his mortality, the discovery that he doesn‘t rea...

Originally published in May 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. This is a delightful Regency romance from the mother of the genre, Georgette Heyer. It should perhaps rather be classified as a historical novel with a romantic twist, because, like in all the Heyer novels I have read so far, the romantic element doesn’t come in until about 3/4 of the way into the story and takes second place to adventure. All the way through it is a delightful romp with a plot that would not feel out of place in a Shakespearian comedy. Sir Richard Wyndham, dandy and sportsman supreme, is about to give in to family pressure and marry a young woman who only wants him because he’s rich and can get her family out of financial trouble. As he walks from his club one night, slightly the worse for drink (as they would have put it back in those days), he sees a young woman, dressed as a boy, struggling to climb out a window. She turns out to be the Honourable Miss Penelope Creed, an heiress who is attempting to ...

This was my third Chunkster Challenge read, the one for November, but for technical reasons (i.e. it took me 2 days to write the review) I was unable to post it until today. My final book in the challenge will be The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, which is incidentally also a Top Mysteries Challenge book. Original French title : Les Trois Mousquetaires Genre : Adventure, historical novel Year of publication : 1844 Setting & time : France and England, 1625-28 Translated into English by : William Barrow (1846) Page count : 576 The edition I read is one of the earliest English translations of this classic story. According to Wikipedia, this edition, which seems to have stayed in print all this time is “fairly faithful to the original” with the exception that “all of the explicit and many of the implicit references to sexuality had been removed to conform to 19th-century English standards”. This has made me curious to read a modern, unexpurgated version, but that will hav...

Today we Icelanders wish each other a Happy Summer. The third Thursday in April is the designated First Day of Summer in Iceland, and a public holiday, one of the few that are non-secular. In the era when people only had experience and superstition to rely on for weather forecasts rather than scientific meteorology, one of the ways in which the weather the coming summer was predicted was by putting a bit of water in a shell on the eve of the First Day of Summer, and going out just before dawn to check if the water had frozen over. If it had, the summer was supposed to be a good one. If not, then God help us. I am pleased that today is a holiday, because while I have a cold and a sore throat and feel rather tired, I am not really sick enough not to go to work. Having today off is going to give me a chance to rest and hopefully I will be feeling better tomorrow. I have already finished two books today, both, I hasten to add, ones that were already half read. Below is the review for one...

Originally published February 11, 2004. Author : Louis Sachar Published : 1998 Where got : Public library Picked up Holes at the library along with next week's scheduled book and read it in about three hours. It's written as a story for older kids and teenagers but has appeal for adults as well - at least this adult. It's well written and funny in places, but also contains some nasty scenes of cruelty and injustice that should appeal nicely to kids and teens who love reading stuff like Grimm's Fairy tales (unedited) and Harry Potter. Those same scenes may gross out delicate souls and younger children. The story tells of Stanley Yelnats, a boy wrongfully convicted of a crime and sent to Camp Green Lake, a miserable juvenile work camp in the Texas wilderness. There, his and the other inmates' days are spent digging holes at random in the dry lake bed. He quickly realizes that they must be looking for something but the reader figures out much sooner than he does what i...