Reading in Reykjavík

Title in translation: Arctic Chill Series detective: Erlendur Sveinsson and co. No. in series: 7 Year of publication: 2005 Type of mystery: Murder, police procedural Type of investigator: Police Setting & time: Reykjavík, 2005 Number of murders: 1 Some themes: Immigrants, racism, child abuse, missing persons Story: On a frosty January morning a young boy, half Thai, half Icelandic, is found stabbed to death outside the building where he lived. Most people assume that the crime was racially motivated, but Erlendur is not so sure. He and his team patiently sift through evidence and question suspects, and other cases intrude. When the murder weapon is finally found it leads the investigators down a disturbing path. Review: When I reviewed the last book I mentioned that the reiterations of the police officers' personal lives and problems was getting boring. Fortunately it is not so in this story. Arnaldur only uses very brief summaries to ensure new readers know what...

Have I mentioned that I love a good satire? Click the link to read one. It describes about 90% of all the travelogues and novels set in Africa (written by outsiders) that I have read. The author has obviously studied the subject at length.

Crazy, for a bibliophile, is staying up half the night reading a book you've read before when you need to have full use of your faculties the next day and you didn't get enough sleep the night before. I “fell into” a book last night, one have read before and while I announced in the review that I was not going to read it again I obviously broke that resolution. I finally forced myself to stop around 1:30 a.m., which means I got 4 hours of sleep. But every bibliophile knows that a good book is worth some missed sleep. What book can this be? Jennifer Crusie's Crazy For You . If you like romantic thrillers, you can't go wrong with this one. The story never gets bogged down, it's funny, sexy and fast paced and it just made my "occasional re-reads" list. It is also quite the most realistic novel about stalking I have ever read.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887) This was definitely applicable to me yesterday. I went on my weekly expedition to the charity shop and came across two shelves of green-and-white Penguins. For those unfamiliar with this species, they are the classical cover for cheap editions of crime novels published by Penguin. I managed to leave out everything I knew I could get at the library, such as four Raymond Chandlers and several Agatha Christies. I still came home with 12 books by Freeman Willis Croft, Ellery Queen, Earle Stanley Gardner, Michael Innes and other classical mystery authors.

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. Kathleen Norris, Hands Full of Living, 1931

The TBR stack keeps growing, mostly because I haven't been reading much lately, or rather, I have been reading library books. I have cut down my visits to the second-hand bookshop to once a week, and have been able to stick to the book-buying quota (max. 2 per visit), so in theory I should be reading them faster than I buy them, but this is not the case. I do have a good excuse: I finished the rough translation of the book I was working on and am now halfway through reading the translation and the original side by side to look for errors and missed sentences. This is much slower than reading two books, as I am also editing as I go. I have the third round left – the final polish where I remove all traces of foreign sentence structure, grammar and wording from the text and make it read like it's originally Icelandic. In-between I read translation theory. Either I have been very lucky, or translation scholars as a rule have a knack of writing academic texts that are not dry, and i...

I never ceases to amaze me that people still try to put spam in the comments to my posts even when they are moderated. It's as if they think I'm stupid enough not to recognise spam from legitimate comments. Just to clarify: I consider every attempt to advertize something - even books - that must be paid for as spam, and likewise do I consider invitations to visit free porn sites or receive free samples of herbal Viagra and such as spam. Why? Because I didn't ask for them, that's why. If you have a novel and want to have it reviewed, it must either be available for free as an e-book or a blog, or you can send me a free copy to review. If it's not for free and you don't want to give me a copy, don't bother to post a comment because I will not publish it.