Reading in Reykjavík

I consider myself to be an anglophile and have paid regular visits to England for the last 20 or so years. Every time I go there, I buy books that become my souvenirs of the trip. This is one such book. I am a great lover of both language and popular science, and often when I find books that feature both, I try to buy or borrow them. Natural history, including zoology and its many branches, is also among my favorite non-fiction subjects to read about, so this books was an obvious choice for me. Mrs. Moreau's Warbler mainly deals in etymology - one of my favorite aspects of language studies. But it is not just about etymology - the origins of words - but about and how we use language to define and classify the world around us, combined with taxonomy, ornithology, history and the author's bird-watching activities. The author's approach to the subject is systematic and time/history based, i.e. he begins with the "Origins of Bird Names" and then moves on throu...

I came across a second-hand copy of this book in a charity shop in Kew, Richmond on a recent visit to England. (Was there a couple of weeks before the Covid-19 panic started). I love travelogues and one of my favourite authors of such stories is Gerald Durrell. I have nearly all of his travel books that he wrote about his various animal-collecting and, later, filming expeditions to odd corners of the globe, and as a matter of fact, one of my favourites is Three Singles to Adventure , about an animal-collecting expedition to Guiana which was made around the same time as the expedition Attenborough describes in this book. It was therefore interesting to read about Attenborough's adventures in the same country around the same time. It is, unfortunately perhaps, inevitable when one comes across two books about the same place and same kinds of activities written around the same time, to compare the two, especially when one of them is a favourite. I certainly found myself doing this ...

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...

Full title: You Are Awful (But I Like You): Travels Through Unloved Britain. I was in Manchester (the one in England) earlier in the month and thoroughly enjoyed wandering around the Christmas markets, visiting the John Rylands Library , doing a spot of Christmas shopping and eating good food. I only managed to visit one bookshop, and when I can't visit more than one, I try to make it count and therefore I chose Waterstones. The Waterstones I visited in Manchester isn't nearly as large as the big one London, but it was big enough to make me happy. I don't really need more books and when I buy them new I try to choose ones I know or expect will become keepers. I've already been disappointed by one of my purchases ( The Soul of an Octopus ) and I can only hope the remaining books I bought will not be as disappointing. The book under review here is actually one of the books I considered buying, but didn't. I then came across it second hand at a fraction of the p...

I love to read popular science books and have a small collection of them. Two of them are about sea creatures that I found charming and interesting enough to keep and was hoping that The Soul of an Octopus might become the third book in this small sub-collection. However, the title should have been a clue that it wouldn't be. I was hoping the book would be the balanced mixture of natural history and personal observations that I like in such books, but it turned out to be mostly about the author's friendly interactions with octopuses, interspersed with snippets of information about their life-cycles and physiology, some of which are repeated more than once, and slightly longer attempts to justify the book's subtitle: "A surprising exploration into the wonder of consciousness". With a sub-title, and indeed a title, like that, one might at least have expected there to be some philosophical musings about octopus consciousness, but there was very little of that, a...

Have you read this book? Why not leave a comment to tell me how you liked it 😊 What's in a name challenge category: Compass direction. Author : Beryl Markham. Genre: Memoir. Originally published: 1942. Beryl Markham was a remarkable woman. She grew up on a farm in Kenya and learnt to train racehorses from her father, working at that profession intermittently throughout her life and becoming a respected trainer. She also learnt to fly and worked as a bush pilot in Africa and was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic ocean by airplane from east to west. West With the Night is a memoir about her life from childhood until after her record-setting flight, but could not be called a biography, because she only touches down here and there in her life and leaves much unsaid and unexplained. The writing is lovely, flowing, graceful and poetic, with a strong sense of nostalgia. The text gives an interesting insight into the lives of white expatriates in Kenya in the f...

Have you read this book? Why not leave a comment to tell me how you liked it? What's in a Name challenge category : Alliterative title. Author : Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz Sub-title : A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine. Genre : Biography/history. First published : 2014. The 19th century saw many revolutionary changes in medicine, and Thomas Dent Mütter was one of the men who contributed to these changes. While he was not the one who actually discovered bacteria, he did teach his students at Thomas Jefferson University that cleanliness was important to the well-being, and indeed the increased likelihood of survival, of patients, and he also stressed treating them with sympathy. It seems neither of these things could be taken for granted at the time, and there are some gruesome descriptions in the book of major surgeries, like amputations and reconstructive surgeries on conscious patients with little or no analgesia, and also of the inh...

Originally published in July 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. This is a humorous tribute to that much maligned hairstyle, the mullet (ape drape, mud-flap, neck warmer, etc.). For someone who remembers when it was actually cool to sport one (yep, I was a teenager in the 80’s - I even had a mini-mullet for a couple of weeks until I realised it wasn't a good look for me and had it chopped off), this was a great discovery. The book manages to be both affectionate and mocking, and I had a good laugh at all the pictures of famous people that I once thought were incredibly cool and cutting-edge but now, in retrospect, just had really bad hairstyles and a lousy dress sense. Rating: A funny book for both admirers and enemies of the mullet. 4 stars.

Originally published in July 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. This is the account of Bill Bryson’s (broken up) journey around Australia, to visit its biggest cities and some interesting sights, natural and man-made. Bryson is obviously an australophile. This book is a virtual love letter to Australia, especially its natural beauty, and in a lesser way to its people. Even though he writes in his usual humorously mocking style, and criticises certain things, especially environmental policies and the less than helpful staff at hotels in a certain city, the book is for the most part a very positive and affectionate, sometimes glowing, account of this interesting country. Besides covering his impressions and travel experiences, Bryson gives some account of Australian history and the country’s attractions, and the book can, in fact, be used as an informal guide to some of the places he visited. He seems to have been very diligent in hunting down and exploring unusual little museums and...

Genre: The stated genre is Travel, but Film and Social History could just as well apply Year published: 2003 A glimpse of the Hindi movie industry’s newest heartthrob, Hrithik Roshan, sent Justine Hardy on a year-long exploration of the whole Hindi movie phenomenon. She interviewed people in the movie industry, including a film journalist, a small-time director, actors and actresses and a former movie choreographer, to gain insight into the industry, but it is her interviews and conversations with the ordinary people, the fans, that are the most interesting and illuminating. Always at the centre of the narrative is Roshan and Hardy’s ever more comical attempts to get an interview with him (it took a loooong time). In the end we don’t get a very deep insight into Bollywood, just a look at the surface glamour and glitter, with the occasional deeper glimpses of the dangers involved (organised crime both extorts money from the film-makers and backs their projects) and the dark side ...

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. Mary Cassatt: 5 O'clock Tea I am an avid tea drinker and have been ever since I drank my first cup of tea around age six. I enjoy tea in many of its incarnations: the sweet, spicy chai of India and Pakistan, the minty green tea of Morocco, strong and sweet Turkish tea, delicate Darjeelings, robust Kenyans and iced tea with slices of orange and lemon, to name some examples. I have never been much fond of fruit teas or plain green teas - the first I can tolerate iced, but the second tastes to me like freshly mown grass: the smell is nice and refreshing but the flavour is less than pleasing. I guess it’s an acquired taste and no doubt I will learn to drink it if I ever visit Japan or China. I am not what you would call a tea snob - you are just as likely to find me slurping sweet milk tea made with a tea bag (oh, my!), from a chipped and stained old mug (horror of horrors!), as you are to find me sipping milkless FT...

Genre: History Year of publication: 2000 Setting & time: USA and the Pacific Ocean, 1820-21 In 1820 the whale ship Essex , small, old and with a mostly inexperienced crew, set out from Nantucket Island towards the whale-hunting grounds of the Pacific Ocean. Once they were there the crew proceeded to hunt sperm whales and fill the hold with barrels of oil, but on November 20th the ship was attacked by a huge bull sperm whale which rammed it twice and sank it. The crew were able to rescue some navigational charts and equipment and food from the sinking ship, but were left floating aboard three flimsy and old whale boats thousands of miles from the South-American mainland. Ironically, in light of what was to happen later, fear of cannibals kept them from making for the nearest cluster of islands and instead they resolved to head for South America, a mistake that may have cost 12 of the crew of 20 their lives. About 20 years later Herman Melville read about the incident, whic...

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 March 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. This is a wonderful, sweet memoir about mature love, between the author, a divorced American food writer and chef, and Fernando, a Venetian bank worker who fell in love with her from afar but only found the courage to approach her when she returned to Venice a year later. Within a few months she had tied up her life in the USA and moved to Venice to be with him. The book tells of their first three years together, getting to know each other, marriage preparations, their life together, adjustments to a new culture, and Marlena’s other love affairs, namely with Venice and food. At the end there is a chapter of recipes for some of the food she mentions in the books, with some truly mouth-watering recipes. Rating: A lovely, tasty combination of true romance, travel and food. 4 stars.

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 ...

Full title: The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favourite Crustacean Genre: Non-fiction, popular science (marine biology, anthropology) Year of publication: 2004 Setting & time: Mostly in Maine, USA; 1970s to 1990s This is a fascinating book, full of weird and wonderful details and discoveries about the life of the Maine lobster. But it isn’t just about lobster biology, it’s also about the people who study the lobsters and the people whose livelihoods depend on catching lobsters. Corson has cleverly woven together these three narrative threads into one very readable and absorbing book. He spent a couple of years working as a lobsterman in Maine and conducted interviews with lobstermen and scientists and thoroughly researched his subject, and it shows. There is a lot of detail, but Corson manages to deliver all those fascinating facts and tit-bits of information in a remarkably readable manner. He also manages to kee...

I just realised I got through the whole of April without writing a single review, and yet I posted something nearly every day of the month. This has to be a record for me. Of course there were reviews, but they were recycled ones that I wrote years go. Full title: Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy Year published: 2000 Genre: Non-fiction, travel, history, flowers I came across this book at a second hand shop a couple of years ago and was intrigued by the title. I then stuck it in the dreaded TBR stack and forgot about it, until last month when I was browsing my TBR for something to read. I promptly picked it up, started reading, and was soon engrossed in the world of orchids and orchid people. Hansen immersed himself deeply in the orchid world, interviewing collectors, breeders and horticulturists, and obsessively hunting down some collector/breeders who had run afoul of the catch-22 of the CITES convention: in order to own and sell orchids on the C...

Originally published in June 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. I chuckled when I first came across this book. The title, plain and serious as it is to an outsider, is unintentionally funny to an Icelander. Little Lava is the abandoned farm in NW-Iceland where Charles Fergus, his wife Nancy and son William spent the summer of 1996. But Little Lava, or Litla Hraun as it is known in Icelandic, is also a prison in southern Iceland. In fact, it’s THE prison - the one where the majority of Icelandic criminals are sent to serve out their sentences. Fergus even mentions it in the book, and it is probably the reason why he chose to translate the farm’s name into English, in order to distance it from the prison image. I can’t say he has quite succeeded, but gives the reader who is in the know something to smile about. Fergus’ original plan had been to write a simple nature study, but when he found his mother murdered in her home, the plans changed. Instead of becoming just a place to stay ...