It’s halfway to summer in Maine and VERY COLD in Minnesota. Errol Flynn’s swashbuckler, Sea Fever, is nowhere on cable and the televised PGA tour site is not near the ocean. So I’m bored with old snow and missing summer and Roseledge Books people. Clearly, this is the perfect time to start figuring out — with your help — what new titles to add to the shelves of Roseledge Books. I’ll tell you about the new books I’ve heard about, seen, or read, and I’d love to hear what you think.
I’m currently reading Icelander by Dustin Long.
Long, Dustin. Icelander. NY:Grove/McSweeney’s, 2006.
Friend, Millie spotted this title. Iceland, as part of the North Atlantic, is popular among the summer sailors who visit Tenants Harbor, so it looks good. And the book is a murder mystery, another plus. But this is one strange book. “A Nabokovian goof on Agatha Christie” the jacket explains. Ties to Iceland are at least remote. It doesn’t keep me up nights, but I am finishing it. I need more on Iceland because I sold both Haldor Laxness’ Iceland’s Bell and Joanna Kavenna’s The Ice Museum, and I usually only have one or two copies of each title.
Laxness, Haldor. Iceland’s Bell. Translated by Philip Roughton. Vintage, October 14, 2003.
Kavenna, Joanna. The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule. Penguin (Non-Classics), January 30, 2007.
The chapter on Iceland in Joanna Kavenna’s The Ice Museum is good, in fact the whole book is good, but I sold my only copy last summer, and often good titles are not available a second summer, unless the author publishes a second book. It’s probably wise to keep looking.
And guess what? Next on my reading stack just happens to be Arnaldur Indridason’s Jar City: A Reykjavik Thriller.
Indridason, Arnaldur. Jar City: A Reykjavik Thriller. Translated by Bernard Scudder. NY:Picador, 2000, 2004.
This title could be good. It’s a murder mystery about an interesting place, both pluses. It introduces Inspector Erlendur, and first novels often have something extra. It was well-reviewed in both The Boston Globe, my summer paper, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. But the reader has to be ready for bleak. Library Journal recommends it especially for fans of Henning Mankell and Karin Fossum, and The Globe review calls it “a dark, haunting novel.” Bleak.
When I go to the ocean, I submerge myself in books about the sea. Now that I’ve read today’s tantalizing notes on winter books it suddenly occurs to me that wicked weather calls for sharing the cold with writers and their creations. I find that, when more temperate weather returns, I sort of forget and can’t even imagine real cold. So of course this is the time to explore these tomes. Thanks for sharing!
Having a strong affinity for warm, if not hot, weather, I thought not a chance would I like to read something by an Icelandic writer, even if it
was detective fiction. But Indridason is good. Thanks for the recommend.
By the way, where are the embedded images?
I finally finished “Last Rituals” by Ursa Sigurdardottir with a subtitle of “An Icelandic Novel of Secret Symbols, Medieval Witchcraft, and Modern Murder”. A female lawyer teams with a German family’s personal representative to solve the murder of the German son whose passion was witchcraft. Quite slow, mixing contemporary practice of witchcraft in with a search for an early printed copy of “The Witch’s Hammer” as well as lost letters from ecclesiatical leaders of the late 1400- 1600’s. A sub-plot involving the lawer’s 15 year old son floats throughout the novel – a subplot that I couldn’t connect with the main storyline and a subplot with no real conclusion. There is mention of the Irish monks living in caves near Hella. These caves have a prominent role in the unearthing of the book/letters. A second novel with the same lawyer/investigator is due out this year. First published in Iceland in 2005 and in English in 2007 by William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-06-114336-6