Reading in Reykjavík

Here is my first What‘s in a Name challenge book: item no. 2, the something you'd see in the sky , that thing of course being a raven . I have been making my way through the Brother Cadfael series in order of publication for the last several years, going rather slowly because I have been picking them up from second hand book shops, flea market stalls and BookMooch, knowing I would want to keep them after reading them. This is the 12th in the series out of 21, so I am a little over halfway there. Synopsis: The parish priest of Holy Cross, commonly called the Foregate because it lies just outside the walls of the abbey, dies and the Abbot of Saint Peter and Saint Paul brings back from a visit to his bishop a priest to replace him. But the priest clashes with his flock due to his inflexibility and lack of humility and kindness. When he is found drowned in the mill-pond on Christmas Day with a suspicious wound on the back of his head, foul play is suspected and Brother Cadfael ...

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck al all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides , the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead. From We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. A very promising first sentence, don't you think?

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?

"If you're pretty nasty when you're twenty and just as nasty when you're forty and nastier still when you're sixty, and a perfect devil by the time you're eighty—well, really, I don't see why one should be particularly sorry for people, just because they're old. You can't change yourself really. " From By the Pricking of my Thumbs by Agatha Christie

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...

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“

Meyer to McGee, when urged by the latter to take a run along the beach for exercise: "Would that I could. When the beach people see you running, they know at a glance that it is exercise. There you are, all sinew and brown hide, and you wear that earnest, dumb, strained expression of the old jock keeping in shape. You have the style. Knees high, arms swinging just right, head up. But suppose I cam running down this beach? They would look at me, and then look again. I look so little like a runner or a jock that the only possible guess as to what would make me run is terror. So they look way down the beach to see what is chasing me. They can't see anything, but to be on the safe side, they start walking swiftly in the same direction I'm running. First just a few, then a dozen, then a score. All going faster and faster. Looking back. Breaking into a run. And soon you would have two or three thousand people thundering along the beach, eyes popping out of the sockets, cords i...

...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...

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...

Epigraph: Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? William Shakespeare: Macbeth Act II, Scene ii. Short summary: A chance sighting of a newspaper article sets Commissaire Adamsberg off on a chase for a serial killer he had given up trying to catch years before, but he ends up as a fugitive himself. Teasers from the book: 'I did get into the FBI archives once, just for fun,' she admitted shyly. 'No need to looks so shy, Josette. It's no sin to do good for other folks.' Adamsberg looked in even greater astonishment at this frail old woman, one-third society lady, one-third shy little creature, and one-third seasoned hacker. ... Adamsberg speaking: 'These last few days, my life has been in the hands of magical women. They've been tossing me from one to another, and every time they save me from falling into the abyss.'

Since this book has yet to be published in English, I have no way of confirming if Veins of Ice is the title it will be published under, but I found it on a reliable site on Icelandic literature. The Icelandic title is Auðnin (The Wasteland). Here is a little teaser for the book, translated by myself: They walked out of the shop, but Þóra stopped suddenly in the doorway when a familiar voice was heard from the direction of the security gate. "If I can take one lighter aboard, why can't I take two?" thundered Bella. "What can I possibly do with two lighters that I can't do with one?" Þóra turned back into the shop and headed in the direction of the strong liquor shelves. Those who have read the previous books in the series will know that Bella is Þóra's secretary and the bane of her existence: a rude, crude young woman foisted upon her and her law partner by their landlord. In this scene, taken from early in the book, Þóra and Matthew are heading to Gre...