Reading in Reykjavík

I always have fun doing the What's in a Name reading challenge, and this year was no exception. I signed up for it on July 28 , and it took me just under two weeks to read and review the first five books - and 2 1/2 months to find, read and review the sixth and last book.  I posted my first review on August 1, the day after I finished it, and the last one I posted on October 22, two days after I finished it. The books and categories were, in order of reviewing:  A building. Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. An alliterative title. Dr. Mütter's Marvels by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz. A compass direction. West With the Night by Beryl Markham. An item or items of cutlery. A Knife at the Opera by Susannah Stacey. The letter X in the title. Alexandria by Nich Bantock.  A number in numbers in the title. 1968 by Mark Kurlansky.  The genres were not as varied as they have sometimes been, with two fantasies, two biographies, a history book and a my...

What's in a Name challenge category : A number in figures in the title   Author : Mark Kurlansky. Full title : 1968: The Year that Rocked the World Genre : History Published : 2004 One would think that finding a book with a number in the title would be easy in a book collection as large as mine, but it wasn't. I only found two among my 700+ TBR stack and ended up reading this one because my second-hand copy of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was so musty that I started sneezing after reading a couple of pages.   The year 1968 was a pivotal, tumultuous year in history, full of student riots, protests, massacres, the assassinations of public figures, the Vietnam war and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, with the Cold War as a backdrop for the whole thing. Kurlansky has drawn all of this together into a solid, interesting book. Unlike two previous books of his that I have read, Cod and Salt , it does not begin to feel rushed towards the end, and thi...

 What's in a Name challenge category : The letter X in the title. Author : Nick Bantock. Full title : Alexandria: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Unfolds . Genre : Fantasy. Published :2002 Have you read this book? Why not leave a comment to tell me your thoughts about it? This is going to be somewhat of an unusual review, as the book is the middle volume of a trilogy that tells a single story (and links to another trilogy), and I have not read the previous book. However, I enjoyed it anyway and it fits into the What's in a Name challenge category of a book with the letter X in the title. The Griffin and Sabine trilogy garnered critical acclaim and praise for originality of presentation, as well as bestseller status when it first came out, and the author went on to write The Morning Star trilogy, which continued the story with new protagonists, followed by a final, 7th book that was published last year. I got my hands on the first ...

Although the What's in a Name reading challenge places no restriction on whether or not you own the books you read, I decided to try to use only books I already owned - preferably ones I had not already read - in fulfilling the challenge. This proved somewhat difficult, as it turned out that among my 700+ TBR books I only owned one book that had an item of cutlery in the title, and in the rest of my library there was just one other book with such a title. Its funny, considering I own over 200 cookbooks and you would think that I might own at least one with either spoon , fork , knife or chopsticks in the title.  As luck would have it, at first I could only find the book I had already read ( The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean), but when I began hunting for the book with the number in the title I had decided to read, I instead found the TBR cutlery book, which is a good thing because I hadn't planned to reread the other for another couple of years.  Have you r...

Have you read this book? Why not leave a comment to tell me how you liked it 😊 What's in a name challenge category: Compass direction. Author : Beryl Markham. Genre: Memoir. Originally published: 1942. Beryl Markham was a remarkable woman. She grew up on a farm in Kenya and learnt to train racehorses from her father, working at that profession intermittently throughout her life and becoming a respected trainer. She also learnt to fly and worked as a bush pilot in Africa and was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic ocean by airplane from east to west. West With the Night is a memoir about her life from childhood until after her record-setting flight, but could not be called a biography, because she only touches down here and there in her life and leaves much unsaid and unexplained. The writing is lovely, flowing, graceful and poetic, with a strong sense of nostalgia. The text gives an interesting insight into the lives of white expatriates in Kenya in the f...

Have you read this book? Why not leave a comment to tell me how you liked it? What's in a Name challenge category : Alliterative title. Author : Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz Sub-title : A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine. Genre : Biography/history. First published : 2014. The 19th century saw many revolutionary changes in medicine, and Thomas Dent Mütter was one of the men who contributed to these changes. While he was not the one who actually discovered bacteria, he did teach his students at Thomas Jefferson University that cleanliness was important to the well-being, and indeed the increased likelihood of survival, of patients, and he also stressed treating them with sympathy. It seems neither of these things could be taken for granted at the time, and there are some gruesome descriptions in the book of major surgeries, like amputations and reconstructive surgeries on conscious patients with little or no analgesia, and also of the inh...

Have you read this book? Why not leave a comment to tell me how you liked it 😊 What's in a Name challenge category : A building. Author : Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011). Genre : Fantasy, children's book. First published : 1986. I have long been a fan of the Hayao Miyazaki animated movie of Howl's Moving Castle , but I didn't become aware that it was based on a book until the author, Diana Wynne Jones, died in 2011. I had never heard of her until I saw her obituary in one of the British newspapers that mentioned her as one of the great fantasy authors, so I went to Wikipedia to find out more and discovered that she wrote Howl. I made a mental note to check out the book if I came across it, and then forgot about it until recently. I was browsing discussions on one of the online reading forums I participate in and found one about favourite books and authors that mentioned Jones and Howl. Since I was getting ready to place an order for some books with the Book ...

I decided to participate in this challenge once more, if only to encourage me to review some books. This is the tenth year this challenge runs and it continues to be fun and challenging enough to be interesting while not being too long or too difficult to finish (unlike this one , which I was briefly tempted to participate in). I will strike out each category as I finish the books, and post reviews as soon as I'm finished writing them. The categories are: A number in numbers A building A title which has an ‘X’ somewhere in it A compass direction An item/items of cutlery A title in which at least two words share the same first letter – alliteration!  Other necessary information can be found on the hosting blog , The Worm Hole.