Reading in Reykjavík

No.  27: Anyone But You by Jennifer Crusie. Frequent reread. This is my favourite book by Crusie, and one of the books I reach for when I need the comfort of a familiar read. No. 30: A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters (audiobook read by Stephen Thorne). Second reread, first listen. Liked the reader, but am looking forward to listening to the books read by Derek Jacobi, whom I still see in my mind's eye when I read or listen to the books. No. 31: A Boy at the Hogarth Press by Richard Kennedy. An interesting little book with delightful drawings by the author, containing scattered diary entries and letters describing his 5 years working at the Hogarth Press when it was being run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Non-fiction. No. 34: The Potter's Field by Ellis Peters (The Cadfael Chronicles no. 17). Another enjoyable outing from Ellis Peters. Peters was a pretty good writer of mysteries, but if truth be told, one reads the Cadfael books just as much for the ri...

Researched and written in 1991, and published in 1992, just before the Rodney King riots, L.A. Lore is a snapshot of Los Angeles at the start of the 1990s as observed by a knowledgeable outsider. Brooks visited the city for three months and traveled to most of its municipalities and neighborhoods (and some neighboring ones), gathering material for his book. He puts a strong focus on architecture and museums, but also discusses the media, religion, the different cultures of the different neighborhoods, racial relations and history of the city, to name a few of the ingredients. Many chapters begin with snippets of radio shows he has listened to, although some of them actually seem fictional in their bizarre awfulness. The book is just about as sprawling as L.A. itself. I, like anyone else, have been aware of L.A. for a long time, and know the names of some its neighborhoods from popular culture and media: Hollywood, Bel Air, Venice, Malibu, Beverley Hills, Burbank, Santa Monica, Redon...

I am always pretty sceptical when I come across social media spin-off books, and although I have bought a few, I make a point of only buying them second hand, because I tend to just read them and then dispose of them. This one is based on a popular Twitter account and contains a previously tweeted collection of problems that the author considers to be very British, although as a non-Brit I have to say that some of them are just very human. It's one of four books in a series, which just shows how popular the Twitter is.  Much like another Twitter spin-off book (two books, actually, if I have my counting right), Justin Halpert's Sh*t My Dad Says , the phenomenon is actually funnier if you read the tweets as they drop one by one. Read too many in one go, and they become tedious. This book has lived in my kitchen for the last couple of years, where I have occasionally picked it up to read a page or two of problems while waiting for the kettle to boil or my tea to finis...

Since I have already posted about the audio version of another Marsh detective novel, Artists in Crime , which was read by a different narrator, I figured I would do one for this one as well, just to compare the narrators. There have been a number of different audiobook narrators for the books in this series, but Philip Franks and James Saxon have each narrated more of them than any of the other narrators and therefore I decided it would be interesting to compare their styles and techniques. As I mentioned in the previous post , I was mainly happy with Philip Franks' narration of Artists in Crime, with the sole exception of his pronunciation of Roderick Alleyn's last name. His reading was even and the voices just different enough to tell them apart, and his pacing was good. James Saxon, who narrated this book, pronounces Alleyn's name the way I have always thought it should be pronounced, i.e. the same way as Allen , which is good. Saxon has (or rather had - he die...

Published in 1931, Police at the Funeral is the fourth of the Albert Campion detective novels by Margery Allingham. As I haven't read the previous novels and it has been along time since I read the only other Campion novel I have read , I don't feel equipped to comment much on Campion as a character, except to say that he's quite superficially developed at this point and he and Lord Peter Wimsey might well be first cousins: both are charming and aristocratic (although Campion's status is only hinted at by other characters - he is, in fact operating under an assumed name) and can look deceptively silly and vacuous when they want to, to the detriment of anyone who has to match wits with them. He also slips quite adroitly into a Bertie Wooster type role when he is trying to lull people into thinking him inconsequential and stupid. Anyhow, the story is about a family of middle-aged and elderly eccentrics who live in a house belonging to a formidable old lady who is mo...

I first became aware of Nick Bantock's illustrated novels when I came across the first edition of Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence when it was published in 1991. I didn't read them, however, until a few years ago, and found them beautiful - and the story rather superficial. This story concerns a young art conservator, Sarah, who is lured away from her safe museum job by a mysterious man who only corresponds with her through emails. While she works on his behalf to reunite an old art collection on his behalf, his story unfolds and she undergoes a spiritual and sexual transformation. Like Bantock's other books, it is beautifully decorated with the author's artwork, but is not as tactile as the books in the Griffin & Sabine and Morning Star trilogies, as the art is just printed on the pages and there are no fold-ins to unfold or envelopes containing letters to pull out. The story is told more in text than in images, which means that the reader...