The 2011 book quest: Books 12 & 13.

I have not had much time to really sit down and read Dværgen fra Normandiet like a book deserves to be read. A good book deserves peace and quiet, contemplation, laughter. It deserves to pull it's reader out of this world, and in to it's own. It deserves the full and undivided attention of the reader, and I am sad to say I did not give book 12 that.
On the bright side I had read this book before and was therefore well aware of the gold that lay hidden between the covers. So even if I read it a little unfocused I still enjoyed it.

I think I mentioned somewhere that I have studied history, well this book is exactly why I did that. It is the perfect mixture of history and fiction. The historic part and the fictional universe built around it match perfectly, and none of them steal the lead, they both carry the story all the way through.

The book centers around the making of the Bayeux Tapestry and the entire plot takes place in one convent in England in the years 1076-1078. Most of the story actually happens in one single room, now that I find impressive. The author found no reason to put his characters in constantly shifting scenery to move the story along, no one room, six main characters, a few weapons (which are only used once), needles, yarn, 70 meters of cloth and you have this book.

Four women in a convent is to embroider the story of how King Willhelm of Normandy became king of England. To guide them is a dwarf from Normandy who was part of the kings court and an old viking who fought on King Harold of England's side at the Battle of Hastings. They tell the stories of how everything that led up to the crowning of Willhelm, and the women embroider it all onto the cloth in one long story.

Now I am lucky enough to have seen the Bayeux Tapestry with my own eyes, and I am here to report that it is nothing short of amazing. I believe it has the amount of stars in the Michelin guide book that adds up to "worth the entire journey" and it deserves it. I cannot even describe it, it needs to be seen.
So this book really makes me want to go there again, and again.

Here it is in the read-pile:

And that was book 12. Now on to 13.

I could not sleep at all last night so what to do? Grab the nearest book!

It turned out to be Derby Girl by Shauna Cross. Some might know it as Whip It, it was made into a movie of that name and they consequently changed the name of the book to fit.

It is a sweet little book that takes about a night to read and though the plot is not riveting it is nice and warm and fuzzy and I cannot help having a little tear in my eye near the ending.
All in all a good go-to book when all else fails, sort of like a security blanket in book form, and we all need security blankets sometimes when the world falls down around us.

Do not get me wrong, my world is not falling apart, it seemed like it might a couple of weeks ago, but it didn't and now it is all sunshine and rainbows again. So that is not why I picked up Derby Girl, I picked it up because A was sleeping and I snuck around the apartment looking for something to read and suddenly the bright orange cover was shining at me from the couch.

I was like it was teasing me "come on, pick me up, you know you wanna. I'm just a short, tiny little book, you'll be done in no time, I swear" And so I did and I was and here we are with book 13 Derby Girl by Shauna Cross.

Read-pile pic: (uhh it's growing)

Next up is the Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice mainly because I found a really pretty version of it in a used bookstore. I know it is actually a pretty cheap version, but with the maroon and gold I just went gaga and had to have it. And since I have already used an Austen quote to finish of a previous post I will use the first sentence of this book instead:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

The 2011 book quest: Book 11.

I finished the rule of four last night and I have to say; I should have listened to my mom. 
She was right, it is a bad book. Well maybe bad is to harsh, but uninteresting then. 
Nothing happens, at least Dan Brown knows how to pace the story, reel in the reader and set up riddles that even normal people could solve with a little thought.

But the plot of this book took place over two days that seemed like an eternity, the story was mostly the protagonist whining to himself how he screwed everything up and how he misses his daddy. And the actual mystery was not revealed with great care, it was just: "Oh look heres what it says in Latin, wait I'm a pretentious jerk I'll quickly translate it to English". And i took Latin in high school, it was boring as hell, so kudos to anyone who bothered to learn it, but the book just comes of as douchy with its "know it all" attitude (yes books can have attitudes).

The plot, which seemed exiting on the back cover, turned out to be the least of the book. It was instead filled with selfpity and douchebaggery. And so i am proud to announce that this is, so far, the worst book of the quest.
I am sorry i didn't listen mom.


Well here it is in the read-pile:

And so to help me get back on track after some not so interesting titles, I have chosen a book I have read before. It is great, and just the fact that I know I will not hate it makes me want to read it so badly. 
I think that is exactly what I need right now, a book that is guaranteed to be good.


The last time I read this one I think I was 12. I love this author he filled my youth with the viking gods in his series about Erik Menneskesøn (actually I might re-read those for the quest too), and this book I have chosen is about the beautiful Bayeux tapestry and how it was made.


So book 12 will be: Dværgen fra Normandiet (The Dwarf from Normandy) by Lars-Henrik Olsen.

The 2011 book quest: Book 10.

The 10th book in my quest was Mister God, This is Anna by Fynn. Like I wrote in my previous post it was a recommendation from a good friend and here it is in the read-pile:

It took a long time to finish, mainly because I really did not like it. I felt sort of bad when my friend asked if I had finished it and I had to say that I was struggling because I found it uninteresting. I mean it is his favorite book, but he said something that made a lot of sense: "Maybe you need to have a strong relationship with god and religion to enjoy it".
Now that would make sense, I am not religious, my parents are atheists and so they raised us without religion. Not in the "religious people are fools" way, just in the "believe in whatever you like" way. My friend on the other hand, is religious, and so maybe the book caught him and made sense took him on a whole other level.

If we look past the strong religious message in the book, there were some things that I found annoying. First and foremost the language. I know it was meant to set the scene in East London, but for someone not of English origin it made the story halt to a stop quite often, as I had to piece together strings of half-words with missing letters and expressions I had never before encountered.

Next was the relationship between Anna and Fynn, it seemed weird and creepy and I could never really get past the nagging feeling, that in a couple of pages, something very disturbing was going to happen.

All in all it was not a book I enjoyed, but this quest is not just about reading books I know from the start I will like. It is a journey of discovery, a quest to see new and exiting worlds unfold in the pages of books I just happen to stumble upon.

And with that my quest continues, and it does so with a book I have been told was published after Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, as it was meant to ride on the sudden wave of interest for historic mystery novels that sprung from that. I borrowed it, along with a slew of others, from my mom's bookshelves and her review was less than favorable, but let us see what happens.

Book 11 will be The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason.

The 2011 book quest: Books 8 & 9.

The last week has been very busy, and so I only just finished book 8 yesterday. More on the business later, now on to the book. The Other Hand by Chris Cleave, here it is in the read-pile:

I shall try not to spoil anything that happens in it, just as the back cover asks not to. I did enjoy the book, though I found the story to be a little slow. The language however was very impressive, how it changed with the different characters was amazing. The author managed to give each character his or her unique speech pattern and so the reader is never in doubt of who is talking.
The story is very real in the global community we inhabit, and the reality hits you and gnaws at you until you accept it as true.

I was supposed to post this yesterday, and I had started writing it, but something got in the way. That something being the realization that it was St. Patrick's Day. Now I am not Irish, and all my Irish friends live in Copenhagen so it was not the "Kiss me I'm Irish" part of St. Patrick's that was calling, it was more the "oh beer" part.
So instead of finishing what I started, I instead went to the bar, had a few beers and a couple of games of pool and then went home slightly buzzed.
I am in no way dissatisfied with my decision.

The thing is, when I went to bed, I could not sleep. So I naturally picked up the nearest book. It turned out to be an old one of my own, which means I have read it before, but not for a long time.
I have done the Google-thing and as I suspected it is not translated to English, but the version I have is called "Hævnens Time" which basically means "The Hour of Revenge" and it is also published under the title "This is how War is made". It is by Flemming Jarlskov and is written for a teenage audience.

However it has a very adult theme even though all the main characters are 12 to 14 years old. It is not a manual for how to start a war, but it describes how a group of schoolboys take on the older boys in school and savagely start a war that they cannot control or even understand the full consequences of before it is too late. And why do they start this war? Because of a tarmac football field in the schoolyard.

At one point in the book, the protagonist compares their battle against the older boys to the Palestinian fight to have their land back. He watches a documentary about how their land was taken and how they use any means to get it back, and he realizes that what he and his friends are doing is exactly the same, just on a smaller scale.

The whole book is written as an essay from the protagonist to his teacher, to explain why they did what they did, and especially to explain to the teacher that the grown-up rules do not always apply to the children's world. The book has many of the same themes as book 7: The Evil, there is a secret world that adolescents live in that adults do not understand, and cannot be bothered to understand.

The next book will be a recommendation from a good friend of mine, he says he has read it quite a few times and always cries, so let us see if I can make it through without having my heart broken.

And so I shall leave you with:

Book 10: Mister God, This is Anna by Fynn.

The 2011 book quest.

Two and a half years ago, on the 24th of august, I moved to this city. 
Three days later I began studying history at the local university. Now I have always been an ... Well let's just call it an enthusiastic reader, I basically read everything I could get my hands on. And so even though the older students told us there would be so much to read that we would never be able to read it all, I tried to do just that. 


I read all the required pages and then some, I read the suggested reading and asked for more, but even though I loved reading I started to loathe reading about history, so I stopped. The thing is, I was never a very good student. I love learning, but on my own terms. So when reading about history started to bore me, I just stopped. I still made it through my classes okay, and I still to this day love history, but studying it did something to me, something horrible. It killed my joy in reading. 


I didn't stop reading, but I got really bad at it. Stopping halfway through a book too start another, telling myself I would finish the first one once I was done with this new exiting one, then stopping halfway through that to begin a new book, and so on.

I have been a very naughty reader and it needs to stop! 


Last week I thought of a way to hopefully save my love of reading from certain oblivion, and so this is my plan:

1) I shall read a book for every week in the year 2011.
2) They must all be works of fiction.
3) I do not have to read a book every week but I must have read 52 books by midnight on the 31st of December 2011.

Those are the three simple rules. Seeing as we are already in march I was already behind when I started, by 6 books nonetheless. But over the weekend I managed to finish an old one and read one aloud to my girlfriend. So by the start of this week I was only 5 behind.

The books I have read so far are:

1) Lewis Wallace: Ben Hur

2) Agatha Christie: Murder on the Nile

3) Dan Brown: The Lost Symbol

4) Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle book

5) Jostein Gaarder: Sophie's World

The only one I have read before was the Gaarder one, but that was 10 years ago. It was still the same, very heavy in the beginning and hard to get in to, but after a while i couldn't let go of it. And all that hard work of making it through the history of philosophy is rewarded in the end when you make it to the philosophic garden party with all it's sidesplitting sillyness.


The Kipling disappointed me, I had thought it to be more clever and witty, but I was left with an easy to read bedtime story for my girlfriend (Whose name I shall not mention, but let's just call her A for now cos this whole " my girlfriend" thing is just silly), which, don't get me wrong, is fine, but when you expect greatness and find *meh* disappointment is inevitable. 


The Brown was amazing, not because it was any different than the other ones in the series, but because I shelled out the double amount of money for a copy that had colour pictures, maps and all sorts of neat details. It really helped bring the story to life. Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code were easier for me to relate to, because I have been to Rome and Paris, but I have never been to Washington and so the pictures made it seem like I was getting a guided tour of the city.


The Christie was, like any Christie, well thought out. It was the only of the five books that I read in english. I love reading books in english, especially if they were originally written that way. It adds something to the voice of the book, but since I'm not exactly rich and I love owning my books, I often buy them at second hand stores and there the amount of books in english are limited. 


And lastly the Wallace, I get why it's a classic. It was well written, had action and drama. I enjoyed it quite a lot, maybe a little too much in A's opinion. She had a hard time getting me away from it for long periods of time.
So on to new books, stories and adventures.
Right now I'm reading Robin Hood. Next up on my list is A Farewell to Arms. 


I plan to read, as I've always done, a little in a lot of genres and for a long time I've wanted to read some of the old classics that I've never gotten around to. Thus the Ben Hur and Robin Hood. 

Well I'm of to read about Robert of locksley and all his merry men, toodles.