Reading in Reykjavík

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...

Genre: Fantasy, alternative reality Year of publication: 2004 Setting & time: England (mostly), Spain, Italy; Early 19th century Mr. Norrell, a gentleman magician - the first to do genuine magic is several centuries - proves that magic has not disappeared from England and offers his assistance to the government in the fight against Napoleon. He is a very selfish man and in order to make sure no-one else can compete with him, he buys all the books on magic he can find and collects them in his well-guarded library, and prevents others from trying to do or learn magic. When another gentleman magician, Jonathan Strange, appears on the scene, Norrell is at first hostile, but eventually he accepts the young man as his apprentice. But that is only the beginning … At a whopping 845 pages, this is the longest book I have read in quite a while, but unlike some other long books I have read (e.g. The Historian ) it would have been very difficult to prune anything from it. The narrative...

Here is my first Chunkster Challenge read. Genre: Historical novel Year of publication: 1988 Setting & time: England and Australia, 1850s and 60s Page count: 520 In 1865 an English Anglican minister and an Australian heiress, both of them gambling addicts, meet aboard a passenger ship to Australia and this meeting leads to a strange and fateful wager. But before coming to that point, we get to see how they became who they are and how each became addicted to gambling and all the little things that brought them together. This is one of those long, juicy novels that a reader can immerse themselves in without feeling compelled to read it in a single sitting. There is nothing inherently thrilling in it (until towards the end when the wager is made), but the slowly unfolding story and wonderfully realistic characters Carey has created and stocked the book with provide an entertaining and juicy read. 4+ stars. Awards: The Booker Prize, 1988.

Looking at the books I posted in the Top Ten Books I Can't Believe I've Never Read meme, I realised that they all have something in common: these are all long books, or, in the case of Brennu-Njáls Saga , relatively long. Since I have finished the Bibliophilic Book Challenge and am on the verge of finishing the Global Reading Challenge, this meme provides me with a new challenge: to finish the year with some of these big, fat books. To that end I have signed up for the Chunkster Challenge . I figure I can read one chunky book per month in addition to my shorter reads, and since there are four months left in the year, I am signing up for the intermediate level: Do These Books Make my Butt Look Big? I will choose three books from the abovementioned list, and the fourth will be my final Global Reading Challenge book, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda .