Before her epic Icelandic journey begins, Valerie Tobruk is first a toll collector, a job that is often hidden in plain sight. While Valerie enjoys her short interactions with her customers and even forms relationships with her regulars, most just pass right through her booth and pay her no time of day. In this way, Valerie is both deeply part of the world and tucked away from it, a dichotomy that seems a perfect fit for her personality.
Read MoreWith a title like Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth, I was both intrigued and wary of a tome on the supernatural. Having read a prior well-researched book by the academic author, though, I cracked open the first page ready to go wherever Brown decided to tred.
Read MoreFor some reason, a few of my recent reads have featured midwives, and Animal Life fits the pattern. Dómhildur is a midwife in a Reykjavik hospital and comes from a long lines of midwives in her family. Closest to her, perhaps, was her childless great-aunt, now deceased but previously a midwife, whose mantle has settled on her shoulders.
Read MoreIn the 1800s, a Viking burial site was unearthed in Birka, Sweden. The burial included a Viking ship, weaponry, game pieces, horses and riding accessories, and other tools. The grave was documented as that of a Viking warrior, as evidenced by the contents of the burial. As Brown shares in her book, most “sexing” (that is, determination of whether a skeleton is male or female) throughout the history of archaeology has been sexing by metal. That is to say, where weapons are found, it is deemed to be a male, where jewelry is found, female. There are a number of reasons why the field of archaeology has used this approach even as DNA testing has emerged, and Brown provides an interesting overview of this process.
Read MoreAt the age of 22, main character Arnljótur Thórir, finds himself confronted by several unexpected accidents: the death of his mother after an auto accident on a slick Icelandic road and parenthood after a chance entanglement in his and his mother’s beloved greenhouse. Lobbi (one of Arnljótur’s various nicknames bestowed by his father) has a lifelong love of cultivating plants - no easy task in the harsh Icelandic climate.
Read MoreIceland in the 1960s was not exactly like my home country of America in the 1960s. A better comparison of Iceland in the ‘60s would be America in the ‘50s: a place where the role each person played was tantamount; women were to be wives falling in step behind their husband’s successes, and to be gay was to struggle to find a place in an unfriendly world, best managed through a loveless marriage to the opposite sex. Miss Iceland’s main character, Hekla, and her best friend, Jon John, each represent one half of those populations.
Read MoreHotel Silence takes place in Iceland for the novel's beginning and ending and sandwiched in the middle it takes place in an unnamed country that is emerging from a recent war. While it isn't possible to pinpoint a country for the largest segment of the book, in some ways it can represent anywhere that finds itself seeking to recover post-conflict. A place name is meaningless in a place struggling to redefine itself. What attracted me to this and other books by Ólafsdóttir is that is she an Icelandic writer.
Read MoreButterflies in November takes place in Iceland, initially in the capital city of Reykjavík and then along the southern to eastern leg of Iceland’s Ring Road. Having driven the entirety of Ring Road ourselves in Summer 2018, this novel did a great job evoking that journey and so is a must-read for anyone planning on taking that trip or wanting to reminisce!
Read MoreIceland and Scandinavian countries make up the most literate countries in the world, so it is a bit ironic that this is one trip that I probably least prepared for from a reading list perspective. Having visited, I have an interest in reading more books about or set in Iceland, so I will update my Iceland reading list here as I go.
Read More
