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I was pretty disappointed by this book. I found the story it tells to be overly simplistic and focussed on guns and blood at the expense of developing characters, places or motives. The action is taut enough that I could see the film being rather good, but the book feels too much like it was actually meant as a screenplay to stand up on its own.

Having grown up outside the US, I never read these books as a kid, and they're actually very interesting as an adult still learning about the country. In fact, I'm not convinced this should be a childrens' book, because being written from a small child's perspective means it only vaguely hints at the evil backdrop of the story. But the first-person perspective brings the experience of being a Pioneer much more alive than any historical text I've read, and as someone who very much buys into the "the Pioneers perpetrated gross acts of ethnic cleansing" view espoused by that linked article it was actually kind of refreshing to read an account that humanises them.

This book romanticises the Pioneer life considerably, but not to the point of airbrushing out all the difficulties and discomforts, and it was actually a lot less of a propaganda tract than I had expected it to be. Definitely worth reading as an adult, with knowledge of the background.

Months after finishing this book, I still don't know how to describe it, so I'll just describe my reaction. I absolutely adored every word of Laxness's writing, and couldn't tear myself away even though the events he describes are such a succession of awfulness that I often wanted to put it down. The book wormed its way into my head in a way that I've rarely experienced since I stopped studying literature formally, and several of the scenes are still vivid in my mind now.

I think this is one of the finest books I've ever read, but don't read it if you're feeling down, because it's also one of the bleakest.

Given how popular this book seems to be, I was surprised at how long it took me to warm to it. At times the deliberate simplicity of the writing was engaging and light, but at times it also seemed annoyingly patronising to the characters and their culture. Most of the chapters stand alone as fairly self-contained stories, and the highlights were clever little tales in which someone with a little common sense (usually the lady detective of the title, but not always) proves smarter than some people who society would hold to be their 'better'. But really almost all of the little stories do the same thing, so it gets rather repetitive and the chaff ends up detracting from the wheat.

I think this book could be cut up and 3 or 4 chapters made into lovely short stories for an anthology, but the rest left me rather disappointed.

It's not often that I read books about cooking. It's even rarer that I read "manly" books about going out into the wilds and hunting elk and bear. Yet this somehow managed to be both of these things and quite wonderful.

The premise is simple: man who likes to hunt and forage (but disdains showily macho hunter culture and is just a tad hippy) discovers a vintage French cookbook that is Wagnerian in its ambition and Biblical in its influence, and decides to put on a 3-day feast with a total of 21 recipes from the book. Much of the story hinges on gathering the ingredients, which range from game he hunts himself and mushrooms he forages for through absurd misadventures in fowl-rearing to simply tracking down suppliers of things that have gone out of fashion as food. Many of the interesting characters are the food suppliers, and the book is filled with stories of where things came from and how delightfully obsessive the people involved are.

This book's a perfect companion to the Michael Pollan narratives that have become so very popular over the past few years, but it takes a much less lecturing tone. Simply by the example it sets out, it reminded me of all the reasons food is simply more appealing when it hasn't been mass-produced.

This translation is wonderful. I had tried reading a different translation in school, before this was published, and couldn't get through it. Heaney was very open about not being too slavishly literal in his translation and the result is something that's very readable, tautly paced and full of evocative turns of phrase.

The actual story recounted is much less interesting than its telling. It's about the most macho character in a very macho world, who takes on other peoples' battles to prove himself, and where everything is valued in strength and/or gold. I found myself sympathising more with the second "monster" (a bereaved mother out to avenge her son) than the "hero". And the narrator seems very confused about whether the characters being described were Christians or not - they're explicitly described as pagans but then they keep referencing a distinctly monotheist God as if that was the only way the narrator knew to render humility. But it's still an interesting window into a period of history we don't exactly have copious written records from.

Unusually for an Important Work Of Literature, the introduction is really worth reading, I suppose because Heaney wrote it himself. I read it after the poem, which I think was the right way round.

The titular poem is one of the greatest perspective-setting works I have ever read, and I often return to it in hard times. The rest of the collection is a wonderful series of meditations on life, death, history and the author's other career as a microbiologist.