Reading in Reykjavík

- My first introduction to the weird and wonderful world of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater , which I read as a teenager and can remember little about. Since Mr. Rosewater is mentioned in Slaughterhouse-Five , I really should go back and read it again, in English this time around. - I have since read Welcome to the Money House , Deadeye Dick and Cat's Cradle , and have Hocus Pocus and The Sirens of Titan on my TBR list. Cat's Cradle is the one that affected me the most and is the best apocalyptic novel I have read. -It was fun coming back to Vonnegut's sometimes biting humour and revisiting places (Ilium) and characters from other books (Eliot Rosewater, Kilgore Trout). - The mixture of realism and fantasy in this novel makes for an interesting and sometimes shocking juxtaposition, as protagonist Billy Pilgrim slides between different eras of his life, from war-torn Germany near the end of World War II, to different parts of his marriage and ...

Cover on my copy. Thoroughly bland. Film cover. I hate those! I think this is the fifth Mary Wesley book I read. The others I can remember are The Vacillations of Poppy Carew , The Chamomile Lawn, Second Fiddle and Jumping the Queue. I am therefore thoroughly familiar with her storytelling style by now.   Harnessing Peacocks fully lived up to my expectations of a lively, entertaining, slightly naughty read with dark elements hiding just under the surface. It‘s an occasionally funny and altogether delightful book about several people who at first seem to have little in common. Wesley then unfolds their stories at a leisurely pace and, like a skilful weaver (or perhaps a norn ), she connects, little by little, the fates of protagonist Hebe, a young woman who ran away from home as a teenager and supports herself in turns as a private cook and as a a mistress to a select group of men she calls The Syndicate, her teenage son whom she is raising all alone, her neighbour, c...

This is perhaps a bit of overload, as this novel is considered a modern classic and has been heavily reviewed, discussed and dissected. There are even study guides. However, I felt I needed to say something about it because it's such a lovely story. This exquisite short novel is about a young anglican priest sent to a native outpost in the wilds of Canada and describes in lovely, elegaic prose how he becomes, with his patience and non-judgmental attitude towards his parishoners, accepted as part of the native community. Because we are told right from the beginning that he is dying and doesn‘t know it, this book could so easily have become a tear-jerker, but it isn‘t (I probably would have cried anyway if I‘d read it as a teenager full of raging hormones). It is open (and dry)-eyed about death and doesn‘t preach religion as books about religious persons have an unfortunate tendency to, but yet gives one a deep sense of faith, fatalism and acceptance. The message is that in or...

Originally published in May 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. This is a novel about age, ageing, relationships and the ever present Death. The title, Memento Mori , means “a reminder of mortality” and refers to mysterious phone calls that the elderly people in the story keep getting, from someone who sounds different to each of them, but who always tells them the same thing: “Remember you must die”. The calls affect them in different ways - some ignore them, others accept the message, and at least one is driven to minor madness by it. The characters are all interconnected: friends, servants and former servants, their children and caregivers. Their relationships are complicated, full of memories of past illicit love affairs, and the present is fading health, dottiness, blackmail, and an ageing gerontologist who uses his friends as research material. As the calls escalate, so Spark burrows deeper into the lives and minds of her elderly protagonists, revealing their hopes and fears, an...

Here is my African entry in the Global Reading Challenge , which marks the halfway point in the challenge for me. The author is South-African and the book takes place during the period of transition in the 1990s when Apartheid ended. I am not knowledgeable enough about the recent history of South Africa to be able to tell if it happens after or shortly before the racial segregation ended, but I am inclined to think it’s before. Although this is a first novel, it was not written by a novice writer – the author had already published poetry and several award-winning plays when he wrote it. Year published: 1995 Genre: Novel Setting & time: South Africa, an unnamed city and a village, 1990s with flashbacks to the 1970s and 80s. Toloki, a homeless man living on the street, has carved out a niche for himself as a professional mourner. Paid by relatives of the deceased, he goes to funerals and grieves for the dead. One day at a funeral he meets Noria, a woman from his home village, w...

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...

Author: Jodi Picoult Year published: 2004 Genre: Family drama The Story: 13 year old Anna Fitzgerald has been in and out of the hospital her whole life, undergoing repeated painful medical procedures. Not as a patient, but as a source of blood and cells for her older sister, Kate, who has suffered from a severe form of leukaemia since she was a child. Now Anna has been asked to give a kidney to her sister, who will probably die anyway, and the kidney harvesting may prevent Anna from ever having a completely normal life. She hires a lawyer to get medical emancipation for herself and free her from the constant demands of her mother that she always be ready to sacrifice herself for her sister. She wants to make her own decision about what she donates to her sister. Meanwhile, her brother has found a destructive outlet for his feelings, and Anna's lawyer and her guardian ad litem have a history that may complicate matters. Technique and plot: I could not put this book down. Once I...