Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World

Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World by Eliza Reid was written by the “First Lady” of Iceland. Reid is the wife of current president Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson. She states at the beginning that the title and formal role of First Lady do not exist in Icelandic politics, and that she used the term (and the publisher probably had a huge say in using it too, displaying it so prominently on the cover) as a way for North Americans to relate to her position. I misinterpreted the subtitle; I interpreted the book as a collection of profiles of specific Icelandic women whose names were already well known, and how they are each doing something to change the world. Thus I was expecting to read chapters on notable women such as the country’s (and indeed the world’s) first elected woman president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, and perhaps former prime minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir and even singer Björk. While Reid did write a few pages about Vigdís, instead of profiling those specific Icelandic women separately within her own chapter, the women she did cover might not even be known throughout all of Iceland itself.

Sprakkar is an ancient Icelandic word meaning extraordinary or outstanding women. Iceland is known for being the country most advanced in terms of gender equality, and Reid profiled women who worked towards this goal. She covered comedians, writers, poets, students, immigrants, women of colour, community leaders, gender queers, and others to learn their stories and achievements. Women opened themselves up to her, and I believe that if anyone else had been the interviewer she would not have had such access. It is a testament to Reid’s interview style and comfort factor, as well as her own openness, that brought out such intimate portraits. Reid, in a surprising degree of candour, told about her early days in university where she met her future husband and her highs and lows in her role as First Lady. Her life was an open book, and she revealed her vulnerability as an immigrant learning the Icelandic language. While a respected woman throughout Iceland, Reid disclosed:

“I am not usually nervous appearing on live television or in other interviews, but given that in Iceland I am not speaking in my native language, I am more cognizant of any mistakes in my delivery or my more limited vocabulary detracting from my message.”

Reid inserted both footnotes and endnotes, the former not always immediately detectable since the referential asterisks were so small. They looked like quotation marks and were easily skipped over. Granted, it was obvious that there were footnote(s) appearing on some of the pages, but I didn’t always know where they linked since the asterisks were minuscule. I always got to the end of the page where I encountered the footnote, missing where it linked to, and had to reread the page to find out. Reid’s humorous asides were sometimes laugh-out-loud moments, such as in this particular footnote about Icelandic phone directories:

“Iceland’s online telephone listing is an interesting study on its own. The country has so many Björg Magnúsdóttirs and Jón Jónssons that in order to distinguish one from the other, listees have the option of including their profession next to their name. So you call Sigrún Björnsdóttir the plumber and not Sigrún Björnsdóttir the pilot. Entries are not vetted, though, so it seems Iceland has at least one hamster whisperer, one Cher expert, and dozens of lion tamers. In the now defunct printed phone books, they were all listed alphabetically by first name, because we are so informal in Iceland that surnames (patronymics, really) aren’t significant. Whether addressing your teacher, doctor, or even the president, you just need the first name.”

I enjoyed Secrets of the Sprakkar and the stories of the inspiring women Reid covered, but most of all I liked Reid’s personal story of falling in love with an Icelander, marrying and starting a large family and how she adapted to her new life in Iceland. Some of the women she encountered in her journey were profiled, so she clearly drew inspiration from them.

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The Atlas of Unusual Languages

The Atlas of Unusual Languages by Zoran Nikolić was published on thick paper which belied its brevity of 240 pages. Thus as a short book where no language occupied more than two pages, it was always easy to read just a little bit more–and finish the book faster. Nikolić stated at the beginning that he wasn’t a linguist, which was obvious by his demeaning choice of adjectives–unusual–in the title. No speaker of any language thinks of his mother tongue as unusual, nor should any linguist or student of linguistics. I carried this tainted feeling of authorial ignorance until the very last page, when Nikolić finally confessed:

“Yes, I am aware that the speakers of these languages would not find their languages unusual, but I have observed this ‘unusualness’ from the perspective of the largest number of people, who speak more numerous and better-known languages.”

I don’t buy this criterion for “unusualness”. As a scholar of minority and severely-endangered languages, I would never consider any of the languages I have studied to be unusual based upon their number of speakers alone.

The blurb on the bottom of the front cover tells the real purpose of this book. Nikolić included languages based on their figuratively insular status. If they were a small language surrounded by a dominant language, they were included in this book. Thus Basque, Sorbian, Breton and the tiny pockets of German spoken in South America. But Pitkern and Ni’ihau Hawaiian? Those are literally insular languages but they are not threatened by any outlying language. Nikolić chose a random hodgepodge of languages, including many tiny “islands” that I had never heard of before, yet ignored others of greater size. I wish he had discussed Obersaxen, an island of Swiss German surrounded by Romansch. This particular idiom is unintelligible to other Swiss Germans–and I have visited the area with them and heard as much. But that is going one degree too deep–he didn’t even write about Romansch and its state within Switzerland.

Immigration or forced deportations brought some languages far from their homelands and some continue to thrive, centuries later. Yet these languages as well as minority languages when considered as “islands” in a sea of otherness do not make them unusual.

The author used the same passage from Le Petit Prince to compare languages from the same family. As a collector of multilingual editions of this book, I found those passages most interesting.

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The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria: The Sinking of the World’s Most Glamorous Ship

 

The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria: The Sinking of the World’s Most Glamorous Ship by Greg King and Penny Wilson was virtually identical to Desperate Hours: The Epic Rescue of the Andrea Doria in spite of its different Dewey Decimal call numbers, with this book at 910.91634 (falling under geography and travel) versus the earlier book at 363.12309 (lumped in with “other social problems and services”). I can imagine that the cataloguers took one look at the word voyage in the title and decided it had more to do with travel than with the “social problem” that shipwrecks are. I cannot offer much in the way of a separate review when it felt as if I was rereading the book I had just read. This was another can’t-put-down read, however it offered more survivor testimonials as well as shipwreck salvage stories.

The authors made me laugh out loud with two quotes about cruising:

“Seasickness among passengers had always been treated as something of a joke by those who made their living on the sea, regarded with a kind of ‘bemused tolerance bordering on outright ridicule,’ as John Maxtone-Graham wrote.”

and:

“Overeating is the most popular Atlantic sport.”

King and Wilson quoted these passages from The Only Way to Cross, Maxtone-Graham’s history of North Atlantic cruising. I think I have a future interloan request.

Passenger Dun Gifford offered a poignant perspective as he waited for rescue:

“The ship didn’t settle over gradually. It did it in little tiny, perceptible lurches. And these caused fear.”

If I hadn’t read that observation, I would have thought that as water entered the ship, it leaned over at an imperceptible rate. Gifford made it seem that every so often he would feel a lurch, as the starboard side inched closer to the water. Indeed, those jolts would rouse fear in the passengers, believing that each lurch could be the one to finally topple the ship.

The authors offered a different story in regards to the accident that befell three-year-old Norma Di Sandro. While she did die after lapsing into a coma after hitting her head on the side of a lifeboat, the circumstances that led to that accident differed in this book. King and Wilson claim that Norma’s father did not throw her overboard in a panic to save her life. Instead, a survivor reported that Tullio Di Sandro was lowering himself to the lifeboat with Norma clinging to his back when another passenger leapt overboard, knocking Norma off her father. A tragic accident it still was, yet in this version of events Norma’s father is freed of the guilt he otherwise would have had to live with, inasmuch as a parent can absolve himself of guilt when it comes to losing a child.

This book was supplemented by two glossy photo inserts, many of them in colour. The final photos showed items recovered from dives to the sunken shipwreck.

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Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America

Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor was a remarkable book about the travel guide known as the Green Book. This guide, in print from 1936 to 1967, was created to inform black travellers of hotels, resorts, restaurants, nightclubs and other amenities and attractions that did not discriminate. In the time of segregation, black travellers would not have known everyplace where it was safe to visit, or which places were in fact sundown towns should they arrive and need accommodation at night. Founded by Victor Hugo Green, his guide was essential reading in the time of Jim Crow. He even printed “Carry your Green Book with you–You may need it.” on the front cover for many years.

Taylor travelled through history from the year of the first Green Book in 1936, covering the postwar years to the burgeoning black power movement. She also touched on themes, such as train travel, music venues, Route 66, and women travellers.

Desegregation opened up the possibilities for black travellers to visit new places and they were not limited to the finite lists within the Green Book. Unfortunately the business owners who had previously seen their patronage suffered as their customer base disappeared. The sense of black community which one encountered while on vacation vanished as black travellers enjoyed the integrated experience (which, truth be told, was still wrought with discrimination). One community activist put it succinctly: “We got what we wanted, but we lost what we had.”

Taylor produced a weighty and attractive work full of photographs showing every cover of every Green Book ever published, as well as many pages showing the contents within. She travelled all over the country to locate places listed in the guide and photographed how they look today. Taylor told a story in an engaging format that placed the reader in the car with the traveller. Even the pages double-spread with solid text were rapid reads. The print was easy on the eyes. Overall the book felt and looked like a luxurious piece of art as it was so beautifully laid out.

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100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet

 

100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul is a curious book of short chapters dealing with all the concrete and intangible things humankind has supposedly lost in the last twenty, or even in the last ten, years. I call this book “curious” because in spite of Paul’s sentimental mourning over the loss of photo albums and family gatherings around the dinner table where every member is not nose-deep into his cellphone, it seems to me that she could have many of these things back if she only put her damn phone away. Being tethered to her smartphone is not a justifiable reason to sound the death knell of Scrabble tiles, penmanship and proper spelling. She misses handwritten letters, birthday cards and maps, as well as honorable human behaviours such as patience, civility and asking politely. I can only wonder if Paul continues to write letters or send birthday cards herself. If she misses them so much, she has the power to do something about it. I got the feeling that she was feigning a counterfeit sense of regret, and, if she was given a pen and a fancy piece of stationery, as well as a free postage stamp, she couldn’t be bothered to compose a letter to someone. Birthday cards are another matter, as I believe Paul still prefers to send the real thing:

“Now, birthday greetings may instead arrive in the form of emails, posts, texts, and, perhaps worst of all, e-cards, which either slip into spam where they belong or land in unison on the morning of the big day because they are automated. However they get there, nobody wants them. Really, nobody. Ready-made and free for anyone who signs up and signs away their data (and yours!), the e-card says nobody could be bothered making or buying a card of their own. There is nothing fun about the e-card, which forces you to click through several slow-to-load screens before you arrive at anything resembling a personal message. It leaves no recipient feeling seen or tended to. It feels crappy on your birthday, indifferent on Valentine’s Day, brutal on Mother’s Day.”

The author also wrote chapters on experiences or professions that the Internet has eliminated, such as window shopping, blind dates, eye contact, and receptionists. No one goes on a true blind date anymore, not when one can check out the other’s presence on social media. Everyone’s attention is focussed on his smartphone or laptop and no one looks at you when speaking. I mourn eye contact too.

Yet ownership of a smartphone now obligates one into doing all kinds of activities and never leaves one with the option to opt out. For example, Paul can never claim to have missed a call, not when her cellphone will take a message for her. She will never again feel the panic of being lost, not when her GPS and Google Maps can point her in the right direction (and not feeling lost is a good thing). And she never has to memorize anyone’s phone number–or memorize anything, for that matter–not when her phone has all her numbers stored in a personal contact list. Take it from journalist Euna Lee, who was imprisoned in North Korea, and commit all of your most important phone numbers to memory. You might need to call someone if somehow you weren’t attached to your phone.

While I do use the Internet every day, I do not own a cellphone, so my perspective is not from someone with a hunched back and sore neck, so when you call me (and if I answer) I am at home. I approached this book thus from a different perspective as my attention span (number 63 on her list) is not lost and is still sharp, thank-you very much.

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Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers

Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers by Marcello Di Cintio is a compilation of fourteen stories from all across Canada. Di Cintio concentrated on the subjects outside of the confines of their cabs and thus spared us the seedy stories that one might have expected to find in the cars’ back seats. We learned what brought each man–and a few women–to find his or her career as a cab driver. Some fled unstable or war-torn countries while others needed to make a living while waiting for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn. The chapters that worked best were the shorter ones, as I found the author’s lengthier cabbie profiles to be boring to the point where I no longer cared who he was writing about.

The overwhelming number of cab drivers are recent immigrants. They have to put up with all kinds of passengers, and being in a cab seems to give some of them licence to be openly racist. I never realized how much verbal abuse cab drivers face in order to earn a living. Most of them have learned to ignore it. Di Cintio then exposed a chilling fact:

“A 2012 Statistics Canada report revealed that taxi drivers are murdered on the job at a higher rate than workers of any other legal profession. Even police officers are killed less often.”

On the lighter side of cab driving, I chuckled as each driver told the author his immigrant story because:

“Almost every taxi driver I met who had come from somewhere else, especially from tropical climes, told a similar story of landing during the cold dead of winter. No one ever seems to arrive in Canada in the summer, as if there were an official government policy to cruelly haze new Canadians with weather.”

The best chapter was about the women of Ikwe, a group of Winnipeg women drivers who serve a female clientele. After feeling the abuse and discrimination from male drivers, Winnipeg women had had enough. Ikwe, an Ojibwe word meaning woman, is their non-profit taxi service. I also enjoyed the chapter on Rawi Hage, a driver turned award-winning author.

Di Cintio included a pandemic postscript, to document how COVID decimated the taxi industry. Drivers lost customers and had to work longer shifts to earn the same each day. Cabs were outfitted with barriers and some drivers no longer felt safe handling their passengers’ baggage.

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Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

 

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops by Shaun Bythell was a small book of 120 pages, wherein Bythell, the owner of a Scottish second-hand bookstore, takes a humorous look at those who patronize his store. He divided his customers into seven types (and subtypes within each chapter): Expert; Young Family; Occultist; Loiterer; Bearded Pensioner; The Not-So-Silent Traveller; and Family Historian. He himself was not immune to criticism as his final chapter was all about the various kinds of bookstore staff.

For such a short book I had numerous laugh-out-loud moments, as I recognized many such customers in my own book-buying trips. I couldn’t place myself into any of his categories, even among the most favorable type, the “perfect customer”, which he tagged on at the very end in a post-script chapter. I am the kind of customer who never haggles over prices which is in keeping with my preference to avoid dealing with any staff while I’m shopping. I like to browse and wander and do not need direction, unless I am in a hurry and don’t have the luxury of spending hours in the store. These are rare bookstore moments, as I usually allow myself plenty of time to find what I’m looking for. However if my time is limited I will ask the first staff person I see to point the way to foreign languages or local history and I will be off like a dart.

I loved the story about book-loving children, which Bythell had seen plenty of times where parents have a hard time dragging their kids out of the store. That’s exactly the way I reacted whenever I had to leave a bookstore–and often still do. My “give me five more minutes, I promise” is Craigspeak for needing an additional half hour.

In a story within the chapter on Bearded Pensioners, I liked the author’s imagery in describing the wardrobe of the “female of this species”:

“It’s a sort of green tartan waistcoat, made from the hardiest of tweed. It looks like the sort of thing that’s tough enough to drag through a hedge backwards without damaging a single stitch.”

Among the not-so-silent travellers are customers who whistle, hum or fart. What could be more annoying than hearing a whistler broadcast some tuneless pop song/TV theme song mishmash throughout the entire store?

I like to go hunting when I shop. Whether I’m looking for second-hand books or, back in the 1990’s when I would look for Christmas music in Sam the Record Man’s enormous holiday section, it paid to have the patience to dig through stacks of books or CD’s. I always found one-of-a-kind gems that had been overlooked. Like the customers below, our perseverance rewarded us with cheap loot:

“They’re clearly married, because the moment they enter the shop they split up and avoid one another for at least an hour while they ferret away, but when they come to the counter they will each have found at least five books in the shop which have been there since 1970, and which nobody has bothered to change the price of since then. These are books which ought to be £20 each, but which–by virtue of idleness on my part, combined with the fact that we have 100,000 books in the shop–have remained priced at £1 each. I have no idea how they hunt them out, but they do so with such determination–like pigs hunting for truffles every time they visit–that I feel that I should probably offer them each a job.”

Bythell ranks fiction collectors, railway collectors, sci-fi fans and those who are open to good advice as his best kind of customers. Those, as well as anyone who doesn’t haggle over his prices are tops in his book.

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