How’s Your Icelandic?

It’s hard to believe but I don’t spend every minute of every day reading and keeping this website current. Actually I try to keep up with a number of television shows and movies on Netflix, Amazon, HBO Max, and even Apple TV. I find my interests are concentrated on detective stories, usually from Europe but also from South America.

When they’re in Spanish, Latin Spanish, or French, I have the added challenge of trying to keep up with the language as well as concentrating on solving the mystery or identifying the killer. But for some reason I have recently become addicted to detective shows that involve a lot of very cold wind and snow: shows from Iceland, Finland, even Poland and Russia.

Thank goodness for subtitles.

By the way, unlike the a typical ugly American who expects everything to be in English, I abhor weak-assed attempts at dubbing a mid-west farm boy’s voice over the spoken dialogue of a Polish hod carrier. I’ve seen better dubbing in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.

Although most of the shows I watch feature a female detective, since they are wrapped up in four layers of parkas and hoodies about the only way to tell for sure is if there’s a pony tail (and that’s not a reliable indicator itself).

I have one question, though. While living in the New York area I would often skip work rather than attempt to drive on snow packed roads, and even when I was forced to, I tended to stay in the slow lane .. and I do mean s-l-o-w, softly tapping the breaks and expecting to spin out into a ditch long before I got home. Yet I watch the police detectives in Iceland or Finland racing around on snow-covered roads, powering through curves, and screeching to a halt at the crime scene.

Am I just a wimp?

Anyway, last month’s reading suggestions included a few titles I’ve added to my planning list. There’s assuredly a several that will appeal to just about any reader.

10-01-20 – Too Late the Phalarope — Alan Paton
10-02-20 – A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived — Adam Rutherford
10-03-20 – Donald Trump V. The United States — Michael S. Schmidt
10-04-20 – Anatomy of Human Destructiveness — Erich Fromm
10-05-20 – Mostly Dead Things: A Novel — Kristen Arnett
10-06-20 – Only Americans Burn In Hell — Jarett Kobeck
10-07-20 – That We May Live: Speculative Chinese Fiction — Ge Yan
10-08-20 – With the Fire on High — Elizabeth Acevedo
10-09-20 – The Red Lotus — Chris Bohjalian
10-10-20 – Flynn’s World — Gregory Mcdonald
10-11-20 – The Brick People — Alejandro Morales
10-12-20 – Renegade History of the United States — Taddeous Russell
10-13-20 – Hurricane Season — Fernanda Melchor
10-13-20 – Time and Free Will — Henri Bergson
10-14-20 – New Waves — Kevin Nguyen
10-15-20 – The Changeling — Joy Williams
10-16-20 – Nocturnes — Kazuo Ishiguro
10-17-20 – Word Play — Peter Farb
10-18-20 – Frida In America — Celia Stahr
10-19-20 – Real Life — Jeremy O. Harris
10-20-20 – Suncatcher — Romesh Gunesekera
10-21-20 – Praying Naked — Katie Condon
10-22-20 – Braised Pork: A Novel — An You
10-23-20 – Shakespeare For Squirrels — Christopher Moore
10-24-20 – Literary Places — Sarah Baxter
10-25-20 – The Sixth Extinction — Bob Blink
10-26-20 – Rage — Bob Woodward
10-27-20 – Burn This Book: Notes on Literature and Engagement — Toni Morrison
10-28-20 – The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter — Matei Calinescu
10-29-20 – Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars — Joyce Carol Oates
10-30-20 – The Annals of Petronius Jablonski: An Odyssey of Historic Proportions and Priceless Treasure of Philosophy — Petronius Jablonski
10-31-20 – The World’s Most Dangerous Secret Societies the Illuminati, Freemasons, Bilderberg Group, Knights Templar, the Jesuits, Skull and Bones and Others — James Jackson