Reading in Reykjavík

I have two this year: No. 1 is to finish the 52 mystery authors challenge before the end of the year. This should be easy, and in fact I would have finished it before the end of last year if I had not got that big translation job. No. 2 is to read at least one classic per month. For the purpose of the resolution, I am defining a classic as any novel or non-fiction book written before 1900 that is still in print and generally considered to be deserving of being called a classic.

I had some vacation time left over from the summer, so I was able to use some of those days to extend my Christmas vacation and have a nice, long midwinter holiday, starting on Saturday the 22nd and ending today, January 2nd. In that time, I read 4 of the 7 books I finished in December, and finished about 60% of the translation project, so I never felt like I was cheating by leaving my “desk” (actually my parents’ dining room table) to go and read. 3 of the books were rereads, since I tend to seek out familiar comfort reads when I am too busy to give my full attention to books I have not read before. Rereading doesn’t take as much time or effort as first time reading, since I already know which parts I can safely skip… It was raining when I left Reykjavík for the north, on December 22nd, but on the 23rd it started snowing and we had the nicest kind of white Christmas: about 3 cm of snow, just enough to cover everything with a layer of white, but not enough to impede traffic (that came ...