Reading in Reykjavík

Originally published in June 2005, on my original 52 Books blog . This slim collection of essays by journalist Anne Fadiman was originally published in a literary magazine, but adapted and in some cases rewritten for the book. It was recommended to me by several people who know I love reading, and I would just like to say thanks to them for the recommendation. I have been trying for ages to find the book - according to the library database it was always in, but I couldn’t find it where it was supposed to be shelved. I finally came across it where it had been filed on the wrong shelf, probably by some browsing library patron. The book is basically about several different aspects of reading and owning books and an analysis of the author’s reading habits. She discusses, among other things, the problems of uniting libraries, her addiction to collecting books about doomed polar expeditions, her habit of proofreading everything she reads, those pesky gender pronouns that turn everyone in...

Originally published in June 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. I sat down after work on Tuesday and can't say I looked up much until I had finished At home with books: how booklovers live with and care for their libraries . It's a gorgeous coffee-table 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. The only thing that was missing, in my opinion, were the libraries of some ordinary people. Cool coffee table book. I was inspired by this book. My library only contains about 1200 volumes* at the moment, but I can foresee it getting a lot bigger - maybe even as big as my grandmother’s library which at its biggest contained at least 10 thousand volumes. This means that one day I will have to s...

Originally published in April 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. I read these two books by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone one after the other. The first, Used and Rare: Travels in the book world , is about why and how they started accumulating a library of used books, how they gradually began to understand the language of book collecting and recognise the value of books, and how their collecting escalated until they were buying expensive first editions, and how they finally came to their senses and decided it was more important to get good reading copies of many favourite books than to spend thousands of dollars on a few first editions. This is a charming book about the development of a hobby that the authors show can be both affordable and enjoyable, even for people of modest income, as long as they don’t get carried away with first edition fever. The second book, Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in booklore , which on the dust jacket is somewhat pretentiously called a “companion piece...

Originally published in April 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. I just finished reading this prequel to Sharyn McCrumb’s Zombies of the Gene Pool and I think it’s a really good story. Not only is the mystery strong, with several interesting suspects, a likeable hero and a loathsome and rather tragic murder victim, it is also a very funny description of people one is likely to meet at a sci-fi and fantasy “con” (“convention” to the uninitiated, although “gathering” is perhaps more descriptive). The title itself, just like that of the sequel, is a parody of the kind of titles you’re likely to come across on a pulp sci-fi novel. 4 stars. Warning: slight SPOILERS ahead The story: Jay Omega has written a sci-fi novel, and his girlfriend, Marion, thinks he should do more to promote it, even if he is deeply embarrassed about the title which the publisher gave his novel. So he goes to a local sci-fi and fantasy convention, where he runs into all sorts of weird and weirder members of t...

Originally published in March 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. 84 Charing Cross Road has been described as a “love affair between a woman and a book-shop”. For 20 years, Helene Hanff conducted a business correspondence with a second-hand bookshop in London that developed into a friendship between her and the bookshop staff, especially between her and Frank Doel (and later his wife and neighbour as well). The two main correspondents, Hanff and Doel, quickly seem to have reached an understanding of each other, and one sees in their correspondence a pair of people with a similarly witty sense of humour, although Doel is more restrained (for obvious reasons). This is one of those books in which nothing much happens on the surface, it is just a little slice of life, as is the companion story, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street , Hanff’s journal from her visit to London. She had been planning the visit for nearly 20 years, but always kept getting put off, usually because of financial ...

Originally published in March 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. I borrowed this book from the library because I liked the title, which put me in mind of a wacky 60's sci-fi story, or rather a parody of one (I was actually looking for another of McCrumb’s books). The title comes from the fact that all of the characters that matter are in one way or another connected with science fiction, either as authors, failed authors, or fans, and some of them might be described as metaphorical zombies. Fandom plays a big part in the story, and is described in humorous terms, and although I have never been involved in fandom of any kind, I have spent enough time participating in Internet book discussion groups to know that the descriptions are accurate. As a mystery, the book is not what one has come to expect of the genre : the death occurs more than halfway through the book, and is not revealed as a murder until 30 pages from the end, so the whodunnit part of the mystery is solved very ...

Originally published in January 2005, in 3 parts. Book 46 in my first 52 books challenge . Edited to include publication information. I don't know what the xxxx is going on here, but whenever I try to use the Beta posting engine (this refers to tBlog, and not to Blogger) to edit an existing post, the text disappears, just as the introduction to Mouse or Rat? did here. Fortunately, the review was posted separately. Author : Umberto Eco Year published: 2003 Pages: 193 Genre: Translation theory, writing Where got: Amazon.co.uk Contents: In this book, Eco discusses translation as a kind of negotiation: between translator and author, between languages, and so on. He mostly discusses what is known as translation proper, i.e. the translation from one language (source) into another (target). He also mentions other kinds of translations, like intersemiotic translation or transmutation, which is the translation from one form of art into another, e.g. a novel into a film or a ...

Originally published in December 2004. Book 45 in my first 52 books challenge. Author: Fay Weldon Year published: 1984 Pages : 156 (pocket book) Genre: Literary essays and criticism Where got: Public Library About the book: I came across this book in the literature section of the public library, while browsing for quick reads (I’m slowly reading a long non-fiction book and like to relax between sections with short novels). Although Letters to Alice … is shelved under General Fiction in the Germanic Languages (Dewey class 830), the suggested classification on the book’s publication information page is Dewey class 823.7, which is the classification for Jane Austen studies. At first glance the book seems to be a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction, and therefore rather hard to classify under the clear-cut Dewey system. It’s classifiable as fiction because it is written in the form of an epistolatory novel, as letters to Weldon’s imaginary niece who stands in for the common reader...

Originally published in October 2004, in 2 parts. Book 34 in my first 52 books challenge. Author: Jasper Fforde Year published: 2001 Pages: 384 Genre: Fantasy Where got: Public library When I first heard about this book I thought to myself “this sounds interesting”, and then forgot about it. Then a discussion started about it in an online reading forum I participate in, and my interest was rekindled. I wasn’t certain I wanted to own it, so finding it in the library was lucky. The Story: Some SPOILERS ahead Thursday Next is drawn from her relatively normal existence as a literary detective into an adventure when she is called in to identify arch-criminal Acheron Hades. Things get personal when he kills her ex-boyfriend and kidnaps her aunt and uncle and her uncle’s invention, a machine that enables people to visit any literary work. Thursday must follow him into the original manuscript of Jane Eyre in order to prevent him from killing Jane and altering literary histo...

Originally published in September 2004, in 2 parts. Book 31 in my first 52 books challenge. Author: Luis Sepúlveda Original title: Un viejo que leía historias de amor Translator: Peter Bush Year published: 1989, 2002 (translation) Pages: 128 Genre: Literature Where got: Any Amount of Books, London (second-hand bookshop) The Story: All Antonio José Bolívar Proaño wants to do is to live his life quietly, read the love stories the itinerant dentist brings him twice a year, and be left alone. Then a hunter is stupid enough to kill some baby ocelots (a protected species) and the enraged mother ocelot begins killing every human she can find. The village is threatened, and the mayor sends out a search party, forcing Antonio to come along. Antonio is saddened by the whole situation, but has no choice but to follow orders and hunt the creature down. Translation, technique and plot: The translation is well done and the story has no translation flavour. The narrative has a...

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...

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...