Reading in Reykjavík

This is my third Gothic challenge read and the first classic Gothic novel I read for the challenge. Genre: Gothic novel; historical Year of publication: 1764 Setting & time: Medieval Italy, during the  Crusades Conrad, son of Manfred, Prince of Otranto, is crushed beneath a gigantic helmet on the day he is to be wed to the Princess Isabella. Manfred, determined to secure a replacement for his only son and heir, decides to divorce his wife and marry Isabella, who objects and seeks sanctuary in a nearby church with the aid of a mysterious young man. These events are only the beginning of a convoluted and suspenseful story. This, the very first Gothic novel, is a defining novel of the genre, with its air of perpetual menace, supernatural events, gloomy setting, driven villain, missing heirs, convoluted plot, thrills, shocks and revelations, noble heroes and damsels in distress. It is highly entertaining, although to me, a modern reader, probably not quite in the mann...

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...

Originally published in September 2004, in 2 parts. Book 30 in my first 52 books challenge. Slightly edited for clarity. Author: Lucy Maud Montgomery Year published: 1908 Pages: 280 Genre: Literature, classic, coming of age story Where got: Amazon.co.uk I was quite young when I discovered L.M. Montgomery’s Anne books. The first four books were translated into Icelandic a long time ago and my mother had all of them. I loved reading about Anne’s escapades and her growing up on Prince Edward Island. I was only allowed to read the first three books as a child, as my mother considered the subject matter of the fourth book to be too serious and beyond my childish understanding. I only got to read that book when I was in my teens and found it to be rather melodramatic. This will be the first time I read any of the books in the original English, and it will be interesting to see how it compares with the translated text. In the past, some Icelandic translators and/or publishers...

Originally published in July 2004, in 2 parts Book 25 in my first 52 books challenge. I have edited this review slightly for the sake of clarity. I think it's fitting to post this now, since I am again taking an interest in paranormal literature. Author: Christopher Frayling (author & editor), et al. Year published: 1991 Pages: 429 Genre: Literary theory, literature Sub-genre(s): Vampire stories Where got: Public library I had considerable interest in vampire stories when I was studying English literature at university, and even wrote a final essay on Dracula for an interesting course I took on horror literature. I used this book as one of my sources, but never read it all the way through, only concentrating on the first part, which traces the history of vampires in literature. The contents of the book: The first part of the book is Frayling’s dissertation on the vampire in literature. Although vampire stories owe much to folk-tales they made the jump into l...

This was my classic for January and I should really have posted it before my review of Cranford (February’s classic, but I forgot I had written it. Title: Roughing It Author: Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) Year originally published: 1872 Genre: Memoir, travelogue Setting & time: Western USA, mid-1800s In Roughing It , Twain tells the story of how he left the east and travelled west, intending to stay for a few months and ending up staying several years. He tells of his own adventures: how he worked as a reporter, prospected for silver and attempted to start a lumber camp, among other things, ending up as a public lecturer. He also tells tales, both tall ones and ones that ring true, and most of all he describes the life in the silver mining towns and other places he lived in or visited, and the magnificent natural surroundings he saw, for example at Lake Tahoe and in Hawaii, which was then called the Sandwich Islands. The story is an entertaining mixture of fact and fiction, ...

One long book at a time is enough for me, and since I had started reading The Thirteenth Tale when I remembered that I had been planning to read a classic, I decided to find a short one. The first short classic I found at the university bookstore was Cranford , so that’s what I decided to read. Gaskell did not feature in the course I took on the English 19th century novel, and to tell the truth I wouldn’t have known she ever existed if it hadn’t been for the TV series of her novel Wives and Daughters (which I unfortunately missed when it was shown on Icelandic TV). ( North and South and Cranford have also been filmed for television). The book was first published as a serial in a magazine in 1851-2, but in 1853 it was gathered together in one volume and published as a novel. It seems obvious that Gaskell originally merely intended to tell some interesting individual stories with only the central characters as a connection between them, which makes the first half or so of the book ra...