Reading in Reykjavík

This meme is hosted by the Broke and the Bookish. To see more suggestions for holiday reads, please visit the hosting site and from there you can go to any or all of the other participating blogs. I do not sunbathe and therefore I present Top Ten Books that should be in my carry-on bag (or on my e-reader when I get one) to ensure enjoyment and variety on a long flight or an even longer bus or train ride. Also useful, in combination with an mp3 player, when you want to be left alone for any reason: Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. My all-time first choice for a travelling book. I know it so well that I can open it at random and begin reading on any page, yet I never grow tired of it. I am on my second copy, having read the first one to tatters. Alternative: Any of Pratchett's Discworld books. A travelogue of the place I am visiting. Preferably historical so I can make comparisons and annoy my co-tourists with useless trivia. One Georgette Heyer novel , because ...

When I visited the charity shop on Friday I knew they must be getting in a lot of new books because they were giving away books, which is what they always do when they still need shelf space after having had a book sale. I was strong and didn't pick up anything, but when I was coming home from work yesterday my "book sense" went all prickly when I drove past the charity shop, and so I stopped by. And look at what I got (gloat, gloat): I decided to only buy books I knew I wanted to read or own, and so I bought noting on speculation (which is what made my TBR so epic in the first place). This meant passing over several tempting YA urban fantasies, a couple of mysteries and half a dozen other vegetarian cookbooks. The Madhur Jaffrey book alone is worth 6 times what I paid for the whole lot. I generally don't read celebrity biographies, but the Gene Simmons book was irresistible - Kiss was my first favourite rock band and still has a special place in my heart. As fo...

Originally published in March 2005, on my original 52 Books blog. Persepolis is a memoir, a look under the veil and behind the high walls and shuttered windows of post-revolution Iran. Parts of it are very shocking, parts are funny, and the stark black and white graphics make it play almost like a movie before your eyes. The drawings are dark - there’s a lot of black - and simple, but they are simple enough to appeal to they eye and the emotions and there are no unnecessary details to draw the eye away from the main points. Rating: A stark, strong, insightful memoir of life in Iran in the years after the revolution. 4 stars. I'm hoping the library will also get part 2. I want to know what happened next! Since writing this, I have also read part 2 and seen the film. All are recommended.

When you're selling a camera that costs a cool quarter of a million krónur, could you at least make sure that the instruction manual is translated into proper and correct Icelandic? The proof-reader in me is at her wits' end reading that thing. Your translator uses "skera" for "cut" when it should be "klippa", consistently uses "sé" when "er" is called for, and has made numerous grammatical errors and committed other translation crimes too heinous to describe. Some are so bad I smell Google Translate all over them. - The good news, Dear Reader, is that I finally bought a new camera. I realised I didn't need to wait for my tax refund, so I went ahead. It's a Nikon D7000 , and I have a feeling we are going to have one hell of a good time together despite the crappy translation of the manual. I am, in fact, firmly trying not to huddle over it, stroking it and hissing: "My preciousssssss!" I think my father ...

As those of you know who have been visiting this blog for a long time, I have a degree in translation studies and work as a translator. Part of my final thesis was the translation, into Icelandic, of the book Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation , by Umberto Eco. Just after I finished it and received my degree my supervisor applied for and got a grant to get the book published. The book would be an interesting addition to the small number of books on translation available in Icelandic and thus useful for translators wanting to study the theory behind their art.  I recently met with my supervisor and he told me that he had been trying to discover who owned the publication rights to the original book, since permission must be sought from this party in order to legally publish the translation. This is where it gets complicated: no-one seems to know . The book was written in English and published in Britain and thus the logical place to start was the British publisher. The Br...

For most of Iceland’s human occupation people lived in farming communities near the coast and the interior of the country was an uninhabited non-man’s land, only visited by humans when travelling from one place to another and during the annual sheep and horse round-ups. No wonder then that belief in elves, trolls and outlaws was ripe. Trolls were believed to kidnap both men and women for breeding purposes. They were heathens and could not tolerate the sound of church bells, so they lived in the very remotest parts of the country. Apart from travelling and round-ups, another thing that brought people up into the wilderness of the highlands was Iceland moss , which is actually a lichen. The Icelandic name for it means mountain grass , and I will be using that name in the story. It was a valuable commodity that was gathered to be used as food and to make medicines and to make a dye for wool. It only grows above a certain height above the sea-level, and groups of people would head into the...

T he time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness. George Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948)