Reading in Reykjavík

Full title: God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales Side note: I have highly enjoyed watching the magic comedy shows of Penn and Teller on TV and have long had plans to see one live if I get a chance to revisit Las Vegas before they retire.  As an atheist I am interested in other people‘s reasons for not believing in a god/gods/higher power, and decided to start with a lighter read than I would get by wading straight into Dawkins or Hitchens (I have both on my TBR shelf). I certainly got a lighter read, but it really had more to do with libertarianism than atheism and consisted of Jillette‘s expletive-laden and sometimes bombastic pronouncements on this and that sprinkled into stories about his life, some entertaining, some less so, along with his version of the 10 commandments reworked for atheists.  Unfortunately I happen to disagree with many of the political views he expresses, even if we agree on the god issue, but I did fi...

Genre : Natural history, memoir Themes : Seasons, births and death, man and nature, animals, history. Books about intimate natural history appeal to me almost as much as travelogues do. These books usually deal with one person's view of a single place, natural phenomenon or animal and can offer one both a very narrow and a wide view of the subject, often delving deep into history, anthropology, zoology, botany and geology. Others skim along the surface and present us with a glittering snapshot of a place frozen at a point in time. My favourites of this sub-genre of both the memoir and of popular science are The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin and Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. This book is not quite at the level of excellence as those three, but it is enjoyable and makes for a nice, slow read. Cowen began gathering material for his intimate study of the natural history of a bit of edgeland in his home-t...

Genre: Expat memoir. Subjects: Spain, farming, country life, daily life, people and animals. Reading challenge: What's in a Name 2016 Challenge book no.: 1, a book with the word "tree" in the title. This is the sequel to Stewart’s bestseller, Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia , which I read and enjoyed not long after it was published, but did not review. I can’t really compare the two books, because it has been over 10 years since I read the other and I can’t really remember much about it. This is one of the books in the popular genre that Peter Mayle (another successful expat author) calls “being there” books (and I have sometimes called "Brits abroad" books, because so many of the authors are British). Such books can be either enjoyable or annoying, and fortunately this one falls into the former category. This is not one of those “ good life ” books that some people like to deride. At the point in time portrayed in the book - beginni...