Reading in Reykjavík

The Weekly Geeks blogging prompt is a juicy one this week: “Do you have a best list? a worst list? Perhaps a why-oh-why list? Which movies (based on books) would you recommend most? Do you always compare the book and the movie? Or are you able to enjoy each separately? Does a film have to be faithful to the book to be good? Are there any films that you like better than the book? Has a movie ever inspired you to pick up the book? Are there any books that you'd love to see as a movie? Do you have a music playlist--soundtrack--for a book?” I already did the “best” list as a Top Ten Tuesday meme , but this happens to be a subject I can talk about for hours, because it is part of my field of study (translation). As a matter of fact, I considered writing my thesis about book-to-film adaptations as translation. Translation isn’t just the rendering of a text in one language into an equivalent text in another language. Translation studies also cover interpretation of the spoken wor...

Went to the library yesterday and wandered over to the corner where they sell books they have no more use for and found two cookbooks I had long wanted, plus a volume with both of Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently books. A quick check showed there were no pages missing, so I went to the desk and bought them. Last night I sat down after dinner to leaf through the cookbooks and discovered mould in one of them. Little spots of bluish-black mould the size of fingerprints were growing outwards from some of the seams in the book. Mould in regular books is a nasty, ugly thing, but mould in a cookbook could be dangerous if it got into the food being prepared. Ouch! And arrrrgh! I really, really want to keep that book, but I don’t want to have it near my other books, knowing that if I ever have a dampness problem or a water or steam accident in my house, it could contaminate them. I don’t suppose applying a fungicide will do the paper any good, but at least I can minimise the risk of contaminating any...

I see these questions and variations thereof pop up regularly on the reading forums I visit on the web. Sometimes they’re posted in an attempt to start an earnest discussion about the pros and cons of each, while at other times the asker wants to convince the other forum members that one rules and the other sucks. I’m sure most book lovers know the pros and cons of each, so I’m not going to bother listing them here, but I do want to tell you about my own preferences. I prefer to buy paperbacks when I am new to the author, I’m not sure I will want to keep the book after I have read it, all my other books in a series are paperbacks (e.g. J.D. Robb’s In Death books), or I have little money to spare on books. I prefer hardcovers when I am going to give the book as a present, when I know I am going to want to keep and reread it, when I need to replace a paperback I have read to tatters, and when I can’t wait for the paperback. I don’t give any thought to resell value or collectability or h...

Rereading may seem like a waste of time when there are hundreds or maybe thousands of books out there you want to read and oodles more that are available and you have yet to learn about. Still, I love to reread certain books and have read some as often as 20 times or more. There are many reasons why I reread. When I have the blues, sometimes just the anticipation of an upcoming joke in a familiar funny book can pull me out of it. When I’m depressed or sad or upset, a comfortable familiar book can soothe my feelings, and when I am sick and unable to concentrate on a new book an old familiar one can make me forget my illness for a while. But I don’t just reread when something is wrong with me, I also do it when I’m happy or feeling lazy or in any other kind of mood. Sometimes I half-remember something I want to remember fully, and it is often easier to just reread the entire book that go looking for the remembered detail by skimming over the text. The books I reread belong to various gen...

...some books smell like tobacco? I don't mean the ashtray-scented books that come from smoker's homes, but brand, spanking new books straight from the bookshop than give off a smell similar to a newly opened pouch of fresh pipe tobacco. It's kind of a nice smell (it reminds me of my grandfather who used to roll his own cigarettes using pipe tobacco), but it seems to me it doesn't belong in books, and I have only ever smelled it on new or new-ish hardcovers.

Link to part 1 .    How I organise my own library: I am not the kind of person who needs to have everything perfectly organised – just organised enough to be able to find things fairly quickly without having to refer to a catalogue or index, and my system reflects that. This is a system I arrived at after several moves which I used as opportunities to try out different arrangements, since I had to take the books down from the shelves anyway. Books I am reading are strewn all over the house, several in each room. Those I think I have been reading for too long and want to finish soon reside on top of the back of the living-room sofa. Another pile sits on one of the kitchen chairs, well out of splattering range of the stove but within an arm’s reach of the table. Cookbooks and food reference books belong in the kitchen. Food history, food travel books, essay and article collections and foodie memoirs, however, go with the rest of the history, travel and biography books u...

The photos below of the colour-organised bookshelves got me thinking about book organisation. I once got the task of organising a small school library. There were not a lot of books in it, probably about 1500 or so (certainly fewer than in my home library right now), but it was an eclectic collection of mostly reference books and novels, with some art and technical books in-between, all in no order at all, except fiction was kept in a different room so it wouldn’t get mixed up with the non-fiction. I decided right away that this was not a Dewey job and invented a coarse system that suited the library and the disorganised lending system. This was the lending system: you took whatever books you wanted and returned them to the shelves once you were finished with them. Or not. There were no cards, no lending list and no catalogue, and most of the students (adults, one and all) could not be trusted to remember from what shelf they took the book, basically just sticking the books back wher...

(If you’re wondering about the abrupt start to this blog, it’s because I have just moved it from another blogging service. To visit my old blog and see my original reading challenge, essays and book reviews, click here ) I just realised I have a perfect new reading challenge lined up. A while ago I asked the members of my favourite book forum to recommend to me some good mystery authors in the hope that it would yield a good number of “new” authors. The result was a long list of authors, some of whom I was familiar with, some I had only heard mentioned, and many I knew nothing about. I compared the list with the library database and found books by more than half the authors on the list. In addition, I have several books by mystery authors I have not read before in my TBR pile. Since I have this many authors and books lined up, and all in one genre, I decided to make it a challenge to discover new mystery authors (new to me). I am not going to be strict about the time I give myself to r...