Reading in Reykjavík

I am experimenting with book blogging on Tumblr. I like the ease with which one can blog - and reblog - on Tumblr and it has, to some extent, revived my interesting in blogging about books. The new blog is wider in scope than this one, and more photo-oriented.  I started out posting some of my photographs of books, and have started adding mini reports of the books I have been reading. The format of the latter is not exactly reviewing and not exactly book journalling, but but a little of both. I post a cover image, a sentence/paragraph from the book (usually the first or last of either, but if neither is interesting I may quote something from within the book) and a paragraph or two about the contents, genre and my impression of it. I'm also considering adding links to other bloggers' more in-depth reviews, but haven't started yet. The Tumblr blog is here , if you want to take a look, and if you're specifically looking for the aforementioned book reports, the hashtag i...

I've added 18 new titles to the Invisible Library page.

This is not really news, but a year ago I started feeling that my eyesight was changing and I went to my  opthalmologist to get a check-up. He told me I would soon be needing bifocals and added that I was 10 years early for those. Great. When I went for my check-up last April I got a prescription for multifocals and since my father had good experience buying his mutifocals from abroad, I placed an order with the company he has used. The glasses arrived yesterday. I have been wearing them since I got up this morning, and I can see they will take some getting used to. It's somewhat like having your head underwater. Using them is going to involve more head movements and more eye movements while my physical memory gets to grips with the gradually changing focal lengths of the lenses, but hopefully it will only take a few days to get used to. It will be a relief to not have to peer under the rims when I am doing my crocheting or sewing while watching TV and to not have to take my glas...

I’m sick and tired of reading challenges. Whenever I fail to reach a certain goal within a given challenge, my conscience acts up and makes me feel guilty for not reaching the goal and indeed for reading other books. This is not good, because when it comes down to it, reading is supposed to be fun. The only one of my challenges that hasn’t become a chore is the TBR challenge, and I have already reached the goal I set myself for that one for 2011: to reduce my TBR stack to below 840 books. The Buchmesse challenge is a chore because the books that have been translated into both English and German are mostly literary fiction and crime novels and I really need to be in a very specific frame of mind to enjoy the former, and the latter I have already read and reviewed all of those that fit the criteria, in some cases several years before the translations came out. The Top Mysteries Challenge is throwing in my path some books that I just don’t want to read at this point, e.g. political...

Myrká , a police procedural by Arnaldur Indriðason that was published in Icelandic in 2008, is due out in an English translation in June, the 23rd to be precise. The English title is Outrage and the translator is Anne Yates. Here is my review from 2009.

I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I read that an old toilet from a house that belonged to author J.D. Salinger was up for auction on Ebay. I laughed even louder when I read that the asking price was 1 million US Dollars. The thought that anyone would actually buy something like this strikes me as very funny, but in today's celebrity culture it wouldn't surprise me if someone actually bought it. I also couldn't help thinking that "Salinger's Toilet" would make a fine title for a surrealistic short story or a novel.

Georgette Heyer I have only just discovered, to my delight, that Austenprose, a blog dedicated to celebrating all things Jane Austen is celebrating Georgette Heyer's birthday (August 16th) by having a Georgette Heyer marathon that began on August 1st and will end on the 31st. Being late to the party, I have a fair bit of reading to do to catch up, but I'm not complaining. Austenprose is a blog I visit occasionally - something like every couple of months, just to see what's new, but now I have added it to my feed so I will not miss anything.

She has good reason to smile!  Yrsa Sigurðardóttir has been nominated for the Shamus Award in the category Best P.I. Novel, for My Soul to Take , the only translated novel to be nominated this year, so her translator should be congratulated as well. Congratulations and good luck, Yrsa!   Read some reviews of the book: Euro Crime   The Independent   Iceland Review Reviewing the Evidence The Guardian And here is a Youtube video where Yrsa discusses the book

I have been a bit haphazard about adding labels to my blog posts and have sometimes been using two or even more similar labels (often one in the singular and another in the plural) where one would do, so I decided to clean up the labels to make them easier to navigate, and to add missing labels to the older posts. In order to not have too many labels, I decided to only put author names as labels when I have posted more than once about a particular author, so I have removed all authors with only a single label, and put "Author:" in front of the others so that they all appear together in the label list, like I did from the start with locations. I am also considering doing this for the type of mystery and the type of detective, to make them easier to find. I also removed all book titles from the labels, so that if you want to find multiple posts for the same book, you must now either use the search function or click the author label. This is a work in progress, so any changes wi...

As you may have noticed, I have added some pages to the blog. One is a glossary of terminology that I use or may use in my reviews, and the other is an explanation of how I rate the books I read. I may add more tabbed pages in the future, if I decide I have something I want to share but don't want to put it in a blog post. I have considered adding a page with the epic TBR list and possibly the REALLY EPIC TBR but not owned list , but it's a lot of work so it may happen gradually. I am working on putting my BookMooch wishlist on a page.

Congratulations, Molly Ringle! To see her entry and the runners-up, click here . For those unfamiliar with this award, it is given for the 'best' made-up bad opening sentence for a novel. The award is named after Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton , who was the first to use the "It was a dark and stormy night..." opening. The aim is to deliberately produce the kind of purple, pompous and generally terrible prose that tries to be profound and/or original when written in earnest but only manages to be unintentionally funny. Here is the full sentence: It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. From Paul Clifford by Bulwer-Lytton. Now if only there was a William Topaz MacGonagall ...

I decided it was time to change the name of this blog to something more representative of what it's about. I haven't done a 52 books challenge for several years so the 52 books title was outdated. As you can see, I changed the look of it as well. I finally found a bookish design I liked that didn't require me to stop using the gadgets. I may play around with it a bit in the following days, adjusting colour schemes and background images and so on. Please let me know if you find it difficult to read because of the colours, and any other comments you have about the new look. P.S. Maxine, I didn't reject your comment, it disappeared when I edited the post...

Árni Magnússon spent much of his adult life collecting old Scandinavian manuscripts, including many Icelandic ones. Some of the manuscripts are on display in Iceland's Culture House , which is located in the center of Reykjavík, next to the National theatre. For only 300 kr. (free on Wednesdays) you can see some of the manuscripts and view an exhibition that covers their creation and historical importance.

Johan Theorin (Sweden) for Nattfåk ( Night Blizzard ). Here are the authors, from left to right: Johan Theorin, Marko Kilpi, Lene Kaaberbøl, Agnete Friis, Vidar Sundstøl and Arnaldur Indriðason. I was tempted to use a photo that includes a press photographer herding them into formation. Why on earth she wanted to photograph them out in the wind with the sun at their backs, I don't understand. She was also trying to get them to not smile and look menacing instead. Cliché! Before the awards ceremony there was a short lecture on the Nordic crime novel, and afterwards the nominees participated in an interesting panel discussion about their books, their motivations, research and crime fiction in general. The majority of the audience were invited guests, with a few stragglers like myself in between. I wasn't doing any name-spotting, but I did notice Susan Moody among the audience, which is why I am going to read one of her books next: Penny Black , which happens to be on the top my...

The award will be delivered to the winner in the Nordic House in Reykjavík on Friday, May 29th, by the Icelandic Minister of Education, Katrín Jakobsdóttir. The nominees are: Iceland: Arnaldur Indriðason for Harðskafi ( Hypothermia ) Sweden: Johan Theorin for Nattfåk ( Night Blizzard ) Denmark: Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis for Drengen i kufferten ( The Boy in the Suitcase ) Finland: Marko Kilpi for Jäätyneitä ruusuja ( Frozen Roses ) Norway: Vidar Sundstøl for Drømmenes land ( The Land of Dreams ) There will be a panel discussion with the authors afterwards, and on Saturday there will be lectures, followed by a panel discussion with the participation of Jo Nesbø, Diane Wei Liang and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. Unfortunately, none of the Scandinavian books are available at a library I have access to, and none have so far been translated into Icelandic, so I have had no opportunity to read them.

Hehe. I really like this: Town names streets after Terry Pratchett's Discworld books . There must be other examples of towns and cities taking up street names from fictional works. If you know of one or more, please drop me a comment.

Terry Pratchett has been knighted. Congratulations, Sir Terry! While the honour comes from his services to literature, he seems to be shaping up to become a spokesman for Alzheimer's research, which could very well have won him the honour in a few year's time, if he had not got it for his writing.