Reading in Reykjavík

Image found on www.freestockphotos.biz Currently reading: Title: Show Me the Magic: Travels Round Benin by Taxi  By: Annie Caulfield Challenge: What's in a Name 2016  Challenge category : A book with a country in the title. Challenge status: fourth of six books in this challenge

...it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all."  Walter Hartright describing Miss Fairlie's former governess, in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

Sayers had a way with words. Here is a sentence that says a lot: "Lord Peter was awake, and looked rather fagged, as though he had been sleuthing in his sleep." Here is an interesting piece of etymology: Did you know that the word "sleuth" comes from the Old Norse root "slóð", which meant "trail" or "spoor" and still has that meaning in modern Icelandic?

I am reading Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary by M.R. James during my lunch hours and coffee breaks at work, and I came across this funny and somewhat acid quotation which reminded me of similar sentiments expressed by numerous writers, especially those writing in and of the 18th and 19th centuries: Sir Richard was a pestilent innovator, it is certain. Before his time the Hall had been a fine block of the mellowest red brick; but Sir Richard had travelled in Italy and become infected with the Italian taste, and, having more money than his predecessors, he determined to leave an Italian palace where he had found an English house. So stucco and ashlar masked the brick; some indifferent Roman marbles were planted about in the entrance-hall and gardens; a reproduction of the Sibyl's temple at Tivoli was erected on the opposite bank of the mere; and Castringham took on an entirely new, and, I must say, a less engaging, aspect. But it was much admired, and served as a model to a good many...

I am at the half-way point of this long novel. The titular characters have only just met for the first time, aboard a passenger ship to Australia. Lucinda is returning home after a visit to England and Oscar is leaving England to serve as an Anglican minister in New South Wales. The back-story leading up to each of their embarkations aboard the Leviathan has been unfolded over more than 200 pages and numerous short chapters, but I would be hard put to say exactly when the actual main thread of the story appears. The story is told by an omniscient narrator parading as a descendant of Oscar's. I haven't got far enough in the story to know if Oscar and Lucinda end up having descendants in common, but the narrator refers to Oscar as his ancestor but not Lucinda, so I doubt it. The story, up to the embarkation aboard the ship, is an unfolding of the influences that have made the titular characters as they are. Both are socially awkward and find it difficult to read people, but whe...

A suspected con-man starts up a literary society to honour two little-known authors of the Edwardian era, but gets murdered. Among the suspects are a number of fans of the authors and some literary poseurs out to profit from their reputations. Here the two main investigators are discussing the murder: “Maybe,” said Mike Oddie, as they walked back to the car, “we shouldn’t be concentrating too much on the people at the Conference. Maybe we should be asking ’cui bono’ ?” “And what does that mean?” asked Charlie. “It means ‘Who gets his hands on the loot?’” “I always heard that Latin was an economical language.” “It is. Multum in parvo . ‘A lot in a little.’” “It’s like being sidekick to Lord Peter Wimsey,” Charlie complained.

Woody Allen once said that the advantage of bisexuality is that it doubles your chances of finding a date on a Saturday night. Having a bifurcated reading brain—one part that likes „junk“ and one that reveres „literature“—is the same kind of satisfying. You don‘t have to be any one thing and you don‘t have to think any one way. And should you happen upon different kinds of people in different situations, your pool of conversation topics is twice as deep. From the chapter „Double-booked“

...when the novel is first published, it may seem to be a true and faithful rendering of the life of the time it is looking back to, but almost every historical novel dates very quickly and soon comes to epitomize its own period more than the period in which it is set. On A Tale of Two Cities This makes me wonder what the bodice-rippers that were so popular back in the 1970's and 80's will tell the readers of the future about that era? Smiley continues a little later: For all the research that goes into it, and for all the weight it seems to have, the historical novel is one of the most ephemeral genres and reveals most clearly an author's intellectual and imaginative limitations. On A Tale of Two Cities This book is more of a portrait than a biography of Dickens and only traces his life in broad sketches, instead trying to show this complex man to the modern reader, trace how his work developed and perhaps increase our understanding of what made him such a great w...

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives of a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages in regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation. It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life’s lambency in a halogen glare. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you—bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.           But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men...

It was the dark hour before dawn. Rain fell in a ceaseless torrent upon the sodden clifftops and smashed straight as stair rods onto the churning, while-flecked sea beneath. Great waves rose in the Channel and surged around St. Catherine's Point to curl and break upon the tagged rocks in a thundering, relentless roll, sending white spray into the darkness. From the prologue to The Least Likely Bride by Jane Feather. This is the last in a trilogy of historical romances that take place during the English civil war. I obtained the first two a couple of years ago and have already read them (another 2 books off the TBR list - yay!), but only got the third a couple of months ago.

Everyone has seen in actuality or on film the splendid glittering length of Fifth Avenue, the wide wide street solidly lined with incredible towers of metal, glass, and soaring stone: the sparkling Corning Glass Building, its acres of glass walls rising forever; the enormous aluminium-sided Tishman Building; the great stone masses of Rockefeller Center; weather-worn St. Patrick's Cathedral, its twin spires submerged down among the huge buildings which dwarf it. And the sparkling stores: Saks, Tiffany's, Jensen's; and the big, old soiled-white library at the corner of Forty-second Street, its stone lions flanking the wide steps of its main entrance. They must be the most famous seventeen blocks of the world, and beyond them even farther down the length of that astonishing street, the unbelievable height of the Empire State Building at Thirty-fourth Street, if the air should happen to be miraculously clear enough to see it. That was the picture - asphalt and stone and sky-tou...

Here is the opening line: "Imps?" I blinked in surprise at the completely unexpected question. "I beg your pardon?" "Imps? You are imp removals, ja? " The woman who had answered the buzzer connected to an expensive cream-colored stone building didn't look insane, but how many people meet you at the door by asking if you were there to remove imps? On it goes from there, a wacky, funny, sexy urban fantasy adventure that sometimes reads more like a parody of the genre.

Rich, proud and respectable Mr. Ravenscar pays a visit to his aunt and finds her distraught over her son's plans to marry Miss Grantham, a young woman who works in a gaming-house (an illegal casino), a most disreputable profession for a woman at the time, just above the level of actress or courtesan. He goes to the gaming-house to check out the young woman and assess how much she will have to paid to make sure she doesn't marry his cousin. Of course, things aren't really that simple. Like all Heyer's novels, this one promises to be full of quotable stuff, both conversations and descriptions, but I will stick to two (at least to begin with). I am only on chapter three, and already I have found several echoes of Jane Austen. It certainly looks like the interchanges between Miss Grantham and Lord Ravenscar are going to be of the Darcy/Elizabeth type. Here is part of one - see if you recognise the Austen scene it echoes and reverses: 'Oh, I have been familiar with gamin...

Here, the narrators introduce themselves: It's not different, really, here in the city. Just like back in the village, we live our lives together as one. We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people's closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the all-seeing eye of the village gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, 'They say it once happened ...,' we are the 'they'. No individual owns any story. The community is the owner of the story, and it can tell it the way it deems fit. We would not be needing to justify the communal voice that tells this story if you had not wondered how we became so omniscient in the affairs of Toloki and Noria. Toloki and Noria are the protagonists of the story.

The Virgin in the Ice by Ellis Peters, being the 6th chronicle of Brother Cadfael. Here Brother Cadfael is thinking about fate and accidents of birth: Well, they happen, the lightning-strokes of God, the gifted or misfortunates who are born into a world where they nowhere belong, the saints and scholars who come to manhood unrecognised, guarding the swine in the forest pastures among the beech-mast, the warrior-princes villein-born and youngest in a starving clan, set to scare crows away from the furrow. Just as hollow slave-rearlings are cradled in the palaces of kings, and come to rule, however ineptly, over men a thousand times their worth.

This one is Icelandic, a compilation of several previously published collections of single-panel cartoons by artist and playwright Hugleikur Dagsson . They are sometimes funny, generally shocking and always crude, both in execution and content. The humour is dark and cutting and there are absolutely no taboos. You might not want your kids to look at or read them, but for exposing society's fears and the sick and sordid things people will say and do to each other they are brilliant. The humour mostly comes from the style, which is child-like and crude, and when combined with the often sickening content it can make you smile or even laugh, in the same way that an old, low-tech splatter movie can - not because it's really funny but because it's so outrageously excessive and over the top that you don't know what else to do. Above all else, they should make you stop and think. Here is a h andful of his cartoons if you want to check them out. He has three books out in Engli...

... how one book sometimes leads me to the next. The cover artwork of Sarah Caudwell's The Sibyl in Her Grave reminded me of something, but the name of the cover artist (Virginia Norey) wasn't familiar. A couple of days after I started reading it I had an errand at the National Library, and took some time to browse. The browsing brought me to the aisle of art books, among which I noticed a whimsical spine with the hand-lettered word Amphigorey on it. It turned out to be the Edward Gorey book I mentioned earlier, and once I opened it, I realised that what the cover of The Sibyl in Her Grave reminded me of was Gorey's artwork . So I took it home to read, and have been enjoying Gorey's inky black humour between chapters of The Sibyl in Her Grave . I also brought home another volume of cartoons which are no less dark, although cruder than Gorey's both in execution and humour (more on that later).

The Sibyl in Her Grave , by Sarah Caudwell. Oxford professor Dr. Hilary Tamar (gender unknown) is the narrator. Here she (or he, as the case may be) comments on the season: It was, as I have mentioned, the second week of August: that season of the year when the warm days of summer draw luxuriantly towards their fruitful and abundant climax and there is an almost universal impulse to give thanks in some way for the richness and generosity of the earth; that is to say, in the case of an upper-class Englishman, to go out and kill something. This has to be one of the most entertaining first person narrators I have come across, but I expect he (or she, as the case may be) would be terrifying in a class-room.

Amphigorey by Edward Gorey. It's going to be a bugger to list, because while it is one volume, it is also a collection of 15 books, previously published separately as standalone works. Do I list it as one book, or as 15? When I have come across such volumes in the past, I have listed them as separate books, e.g. The Once and Future King as 4 books and The Gormenghast Trilogy as three, but the Gorey books are short works and the whole volume is perhaps 200 pages all in all (it's unpaged, so this is an estimate based on thickness).

... since a book made me cry, but the passage below brought tears to my eyes. McLean is writing about a grave he found in the cemetery in Ferryland, Newfoundland. The headstone showed that a couple, living in the late 1800s, had lost 6 young children in the space of 4 years. Maybe when death is all around you, maybe when everyone's children are dying, maybe when the winter blows cold and the nights are dark and your ten-year old daughter gives a little cough and your heart seizes and you look at your husband with frightened eyes and then the priest comes and then she dies, maybe you find a way to make sense of things. But how, after five have gone, could you have a sixth? And how, when your last boy dies, could you plant a crop, go to church, milk a cow, eat a meal, smile, laugh, carry on? From Welcome Home: Travels in Smalltown Canada , by Stuart McLean.