Reading in Reykjavík

Somehow I managed to miss this Top Ten Tuesdays prompt - the first to interest me in a long while: "You know..you are reading and then SOMETHING happens to completely turn you off -- cheating, absent parents, multiple POVS etc.)" So I decided to do one of  my list love lists instead. My bookish annoyances have already been chronicled in detail (click on the "list love" label to find them), but I have more, and here are the ones that first came to mind when I saw the prompt: In no particular order: Happy-with-a-pint-of-cherries-on-top endings . I‘m fine with standard „happily ever after“ and even „happy-with-a-cherry-on-top“ endings – if the cherry isn‘t the size of an apple – but endings that really pile on the happy like there is no tomorrow really get my goat. Example: the YA romance I read recently in which the „simple girl of the people“ (kudos if you recognise the reference) and the sweet, gorgeous male movie star heart-throb got together (=happy ending...

I read and listened to 22 books in September. Of those, 8 were rereads (one for the second time this year) and 2 were TBR books from the stacks. 18 were fiction, 3 were non-fiction and one was a collection of folk tales, which I can never classify, because 1) many of them have a basis in fact, but 2) many are also made-up, and 3) people still believe in some of them. I revisited a romance I first read as a teenager – Desire of the the Heart by Barbara Cartland, in Icelandic - mostly to see if it was as contrived and silly as I thought I remembered. It was – I mean, come on: a man who can‘t recognise his own wife when she takes off her dark glasses (which she has, admittedly, never taken off in his presence) and puts up her hair? However, it was no sillier than many other romances I have read. The stand-outs were two of the non-fiction books: Gulp by Mary Roach, who is fast becoming my favourite popular science writer, and Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, because o...

Today's subject on Booking Through Thursday is an interesting one: Which is better (or preferred) … stories with multiple character points of view? Or stories that stick to just one or two at most? And, why? I can‘t really say I have a preference either way. If it is done well, I enjoy both. One of my favourite authors, Terry Pratchett, jumps between several viewpoints in most of his Discworld books, usually with longish blocks of story seen from one (3rd person limited) POW or the POW of several characters at once (3rd person omniscient) before the next one takes over, bringing them together little by little so that as the ending comes closer, they coalesce and become one narrative with several viewpoints. He does it so well that it was kind of a shock to discover that he is equally capable of writing single viewpoint stories like e.g. Dodger or the Tiffany Aching books. Some books, however, are better off with a limited number of viewpoints. Ro...

(never thought I'd find a way to use this word!)

"The library opened out of the smoking-room. It had an air of being the most used room in the house, and indeed it was here that Jonathan could generally be found amid a company of books that bore witness to generations of rather freakish taste and to the money by which such taste could be gratified. Jonathan had added lavishly to the collection. His books ranged oddly from translations of Turkish and Persian verse to the works of the most inscrutable of the moderns and text-books on criminology and police detection. He had a magpie taste in reading, but it was steadied by a constancy of devotion to the Elizabethans." From Death and the Dancing Footman by Ngaio Marsh

I read a total of 23 books in August, plus a handful of short stories (not listed). The majority were rereads, on the one hand Ngaio Marsh‘s Roderick Alleyn series, and on the other a bunch of Lucky Luke comics I have owned since I was in my teens. As for the rest, they included a classic novel, romantic suspense, romance, a Shakespeare play and a very interesting piece of non-fiction. The high points of the month‘s reading were the last two: Macbeth and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks . The latter is the result of impressive and determined research into an important medical and biological discovery about the provenance of which very little seems to have been known before the author started digging up information. It tells the story of HeLa , the oldest and still the most important line of immortal human cells used in medical research, the people connected with it and the discoveries those cells were instrumental in helping to make. It mixes up biography, autobiography, biology...

Marsh seems to have loved not only referring to and quoting books and plays, but she also made up titles, so there is plenty to work with in her books. The same titles crop up repeatedly, e.g. Macbeth , The Ingoldsby Legends and Jane Eyre . Death in a White Tie : Publications: The Times - newspaper. The Evening Chronicle - newspaper. The Daily Express - newspaper. "guides to the turf" - no titles mentioned - racing guides. Non-fiction: The principles and practice of medical jurisprudence by Alfred Swaine Taylor (as Taylor's Medical Jurisprudence ) - what the title says. Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis . Christian devotional. The Martyrdom of Man by William Winwood Reade. Philosophy/history. Fiction: "paper-bound banned novels of a peculiar indecency and no literary merit whatsoever." - I couldn't resist quoting this, not only because it's a funny description of porn novels, but also because ownership of porn/erotica seem...