Jólabókaflóð

Well, I am not here to contradict anything, just to leave these assertions visible. We’ll see later. Beyond that, it doesn't matter if you devour 50 books, if most of them are by Coelho or in the style of Carlos Cuauhtémoc Sánchez. I mean yes, you have to read, but you also have to look at what you are reading. Quality or quantity. And the same metric, I would say, goes for what we write. Be mindful, in this house, introspection and self-criticism is practiced. Well, that's where we were… when internet ads came to me, selling me books that I can't read. I really want to buy them though, since that's where our money goes from the “knick-knacks” category: shoes, electronics and books. However, my Icelandic is not good enough to be able to read fluently without translating the words that can change the meaning or the whole context. This is how I found out about Jólabókaflóð.

Jólabókaflóð or “the flood of books at Christmas” is the term used in Iceland to refer to the sea of ​​new book publications that are released shortly before Christmas. According to the internet (because you will see this published everywhere), this tradition was born during the Second World War since books were one of the commodities that were still distributed on the island. It is said that this is why it became popular to give books and read them the same day they received them. Now when they speak of "flood" they are not exaggerating. The amount of books that I have seen advertised is enormous. I put it like this, maybe that explains the lack of trees on the island. Every year a kind of catalog comes out with the novelty titles called Bókatíðindi. Surely you might already have heard about this somewhere, since, as you might find it on the internet, this idealized image of Iceland has been expanded by the media, specifically the Spanish one.

The book that tops the list of the best sellers of the Penninn bookstore, is called Snerting (Contact), surprisingly, the author Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, neither late nor lazy, took advantage of his time in quarantine to bring us a fiction that is situated in life post-pandemic. Quite understandable why this is the best seller. The second book is not shocking either, if you know that in these parts of the world, police crime stories are very beloved (which is quite sordid when you consider that it is not part of their reality, but that makes for a whole anthropological and social essay) . Vetrarmein (Winter Sickness) by Ragnar Jónasson, is a story of a murder that happens at Christmas, which has characters that the author has introduced in his past novels. This book has been translated into other languages ​​for which it has had a large number of sales. The third is .... another police book or Nordic noir, Þagnarmúr (Wall of Silence), by Arnaldur Indriðason, who tells us a story set in Reykjavik, about a violent crime committed in a basement. You know, the usual. It is followed by Bráðin (The Prey) of the “queen of nordic noir”, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, about another fantasy of death and crime set in another Icelandic setting.

Next up. A book that takes us back to the sixties, where the roles of women at that time are questioned, Gata mæðranna (Street of Mothers) by Kristín Marja Baldursdóttir goes more or less like that. At least we are already seeing more variety here. In the sixth number on the list, we have an existential book? In which a woman finds some letters from her grandmother's sister inside a Chiquita Bananas’s box(?) , at least that 's what we can know from the synopsis of Dýralíf (Animals life) by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. The following book titled Spænska veikin (The Spanish flu) by Gunnar Þór Bjarnasson, from the point of view of a fisherman, talks about how the disease developed in Iceland. Another book that is relevant to our times. The next book, Fjarvera þín er myrkur (Your absence is dark) by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, is described with such ambiguity that it seems that he does not want to be read. Eldarnir (The Fires) is a book about a volcanologist and the new vicissitudes she has to face, now that a certain area of ​​the island has become active. Written by Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir, who also took advantage of another current topic, since this year we had a lot of activity of all kinds. Finally, Sögu handa Kára (Stories for Kári), written by the former president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, which was originally a podcast, where he narrates anecdotes of his encounters with other world leaders and personalities.

Now this is an item that caught my attention. There is a list from the same bookstore of the best-selling children's books. Here I will mention the first three positions. The first title is Orri óstöðvandi: Bókin hennar Möggu Messi (Orri the unstoppable: The book of Magga Messi), which belongs to a series of books by the author Bjarni Fritzson. The book is a story about a soccer-loving kid and his adventures. Þín eigin undirdjup (Your own abyss) by Ævar Þór Benediktsson, is the seventh book in this series, which takes the reader on an underwater journey, in a "choose your own adventure” style. The third book is technically one of those sound books, so we won't talk about this any more.