The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums | 
pickI love when non-fiction is paired with a beautiful writing style. The focus is on the history of the museums themselves, their founding and housing and collection origins, just enough historical context. Questioning 'what makes a museum?' especially 'vs private collection' ? Iceland seen as an alien physical landscape of close knit communities with its own rocky history. A fair amount of quirky, a bit WTF?! Definitely worth a read.
Mr. Hippopotamus the Cat. I love him.
"The cat is Mr. Hippopotamus. He is appropriately large and round and gray, and seems as comfortable at the museum as anywhere else...there is an oversize portrait of Mr. Hippopotamus staring beneficently into the middle distance, what Sigurd[th]ur Atlason calls his communist leader pose." ?
Today's 'scratched my brain just right' phrase is a bit o' alliteration:
"...skip-skimming across such a strata of survival"
New word alert! Icelandic has some nifty ones. If your population rates low enough on census, you get to be "...a dreifbyli: a 'someplace'..."
Adorable sketch, sad reflections.
A different way to think about birds:
"...tokens of transport and circulation"
Bias at work? It's at least useful to keep in mind.
I don't suggest anyone test the hypothesis, but I've found it to be true, on occasion.
My final book for 2020 takes me back to Iceland 🇮🇸 with a tour through its museums and quirky collections. An amazing place to visit especially for myself coming from a subtropical climate without a hint of snow, lava or ice!!
Happy New Year everyone. Hopefully one day we will be able to adventure abroad again. Happy reading! Stay healthy 😘😘
pickAn odd little one, but interesting
“It‘s always been the story that matters most, the connections inferred, the object not as a thing of inherent properties but as a touchstone to who we are and where we come from.”
“The tourist then demanded to know, ‘What kind of museum has only one bathroom?‘ A good question of course. Except that it wasn‘t a museum back then. It was a house with facilities totally adequate for the three people who actually lived there.”
...
“And maybe this is the structure of all museums. One doesn‘t pay to see the collection; one pays for a place to pee.”
#ARC
