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Showing posts with label Iceland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iceland. Show all posts

Saturday, December 2, 2017

Christmas Book Flood

In Iceland, there's a long tradition of giving books as gifts during the holidays. Iceland book gifting tradition is called "Jolabokaflod"
or "Christmas Book Flood." 

Each Icelander receives at least one book during the Christmas season. Gifts are typically opened on December 24th. Icelanders usually spend the night before Christmas reading.

This is what I want to do this year. No regular gifts. Just books. 

If you want to read more about Iceland, you may want to try these books:

Moss, Sarah. Names for the Sea.

https://guidetoiceland.is/connect-with-locals/aldasigmunds/the-icelanders-and-their-big-love-of-books

Thursday, March 2, 2017

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit


This remarkable book of essays, which critics liken to a set of Russian nested dolls, are interconnected musings on many topics--maternal love, child abandonment, memory loss, illness, fairytales, labyrinths, Buddhism, the Arctic, and of all things, apricots.

Solnit has a poetic turn-of-phrase which makes these essays extremely enjoyable. Scallops and sea urchins dragged from the ocean floor are "bright like internal organs laid bare by surgery or butchery."

In some ways, these essays are show how interconnected everyone's lives--their life stories--are. In the end, though, these essays are also a deeply moving memoir of one particular woman's life--Solnit's.

In her personal essays, Solnit divulges her difficult relationship with her mother. Strained as a child and young adult, the mother daughter bond grows stronger as Solnit cares for her mother's medical needs. 

Solnit reveals her own narrow brush with death--breast cancer--and her courageous attempt to start anew. 

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