Books I've read in 2009 - September

High Society by Ben Elton – AUDIO
Summer of Love by Lisa Mason
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Juleoratoriet by Göran Tunström – AUDIO
The Crow Road by Iain Banks
Drottningens juvelsmycke by CJL Almqvist
Fitter by Juan Manuel de Prada
The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins
Katedralen vid havet by Ildefonso Falcones – AUDIO
Det ska bli ett sant nöje att döda dig by Magdalena Graaf
De gales hus by Karin Fossum
Paradiset by Liza Marklund
Muhajababes by Allegra Stratton
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood – AUDIO
Michael K by JM Coetzee
Sekten by Peter Pohl
The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

13 printed books, 4,038 pages
(+ one graphic novel which I have not counted in the page total).
4 audiobooks, 59h 50m.

Favorite fiction:
Summer of Love ... because it's taken me literally years to get around to reading it, and it turned out to be really great. :-)

Favorite nonfiction:
Ooh ... Sekten was really good, and I loved reading something by Pohl again, haven't done that in ages. He used to be one of my absolutely favorite writers when I was a teenager. But no, I think I have to say the Dawkins book. It was so well written and it explained things so beautifully. Everyone ought to read that book. :-)

Favorite audio:
I guess I have to say Katedralen vid havet ... I spent such an eternity reading it. :-D No, but it was just incredibly long ... more than 23 hours, I just felt like I was never getting to the end of it. But it was a really good book, very gripping, with great characters and a very vibrant setting. I'd recommend it, but you need some patience. ;-)

Arnaldur Indridason: Vinterbyen

Utgitt av Cappelen Damm i 2008.
Lydbok, 9t 27m, lest av Ivar Nørve.

Arnaldur Indridason: Røsten

Utgitt av Cappelen Damm i 2008.
Lydbok, 9t 12m, lest av Ivar Nørve.

Muriel Barbery: Pinnsvinets eleganse

Utgitt av Lydbokforlaget i 2008.
Lydbok, 8t 55m, lest av Janne Kokkin og Silje Lundblad.

Göran Tunström: Juleoratoriet

Utgitt av Lydbokforlaget i 2004.
Lydbok, 11t, lest av Kim Haugen.

Ben Elton: High Society

Published by Isis Audiobooks in 2003.
Audiobook, obviously; 12h 45m, read by Greg Wagland.

Book quote

Was Fergus Urvill anywhere, still? Apart from the body - whatever was left of him physically, down there in that dark, cold pressure - was there anything else? Was his personality intact somehow, somewhere?

I found that I couldn't believe that it was. Neither was dad's, neither was Rory's, nor Aunt Fiona's, nor Darren Watt's. There was no such continuation; it just didn't work that way, and there should even be a sort of relief in the comprehension that it didn't. We continue in our children, and in our works and in the memories of others; we continue in our dust and ash. To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constipatory, too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.

The belief that we somehow moved on to something else - whether still recognisably ourselves, or quite thoroughly changed - might be a tribute to our evolutionary tenacity and our animal thirst for life, but not to our wisdom. That saw a value beyond itself; in intelligence, knowledge and wit as concepts - wherever and by whoever expressed - not just in its own personal manifestation of those qualities, and so could contemplate its own annihilation with equanimity, and suffer it with grace; it was only a sort of sad selfishness that demanded the continuation of the individual spirit in the vanity and frivolity of a heaven.

Iain Banks, The Crow Road
(Scribners, 1992)

Book quote

Tintomara! två ting äro vita
Oskuld - Arsenik.

CJL Almqvist, Drottningens juvelsmycke
(1834)

Tintomara! two things are white
Innocence - Arsenic.

Some books I'd like to read

I always have my camera with me wherever I go. When I see a book that strikes my fancy - in a store or at the library - I like to take a picture of it. :-) Here are some of those pictures from recent months.

Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre

Utgitt av Fono Forlag i 2004.
Lydbok, 11t 10m, lest av Marika Enstad.

Kjell Askildsen: En plutselig frigjørende tanke

Utgitt av Lydbokforlaget i 1998.
Lydbok, 2t 25m, lest av forfatteren.

OsloS-OBCZ

New photo of the zone, taken after the September 2nd meetup. The books were kind of thin on the shelves when we got there, but afterwards it was well and truly filled up. :-)

An update: By the next day five of the books had already been picked up. :-D