Book 48: "Laxdaela Saga"

Then Bolli said, 'I understand clearly what you are telling me about the qualities of your husbands; but you have not told me which man you loved the most. There's no need to conceal it any longer now.'
'You are pressing me very hard, my son, said Gudrun. 'But if I must tell someone, then I would rather it were you.'
Bolli begged her to do so.
Then Gudrun said, 'I was worst to the one I loved the most,'

The saying 'hell hath no fury like a woman scorned' certainly applies to Gudrun Osvifur's-daughter, whose third husband Bolli was the foster-brother of Kjartan, the man she really loved. She manoeuvred her husband and brothers into killing Kjartan, and when Kjratan's brothers killed Bolli in revenge, she was instrumental in keeping the feud going.

The saga starts several generations earlier, in order to explain the family relationships between Gudrun, her four husbands and the other two men who wished to marry her, who are all descended from Ketil Flatnose. Although it is thought that a lot of the characters were real people, the author of Laxdaela Saga is believed to have changed the order and timescale of events in order to make a better story.

Nottingham Round the World Reading Challenge - ICELAND

Book 49: "Engleby" by Sebastian Faulks

'If it's not me,' he said eventually, 'it'll be my successor. The files, the paperwork, the notes will all be left meticulous. Marked up, indexed, cross indexed. And you, Mr Engleby, are going into the file marked "Unhappy".'
'Tu quoque,' I said.
'What?'
'You're going in my unhappy file, too.';

Starting during his second year at Cambridge, this is the life story of Mike Engleby. He is a working class boy who gets a scholarship to a minor public school where his life is made hell but he does well academically, and by the time he reaches university he is curiously uninvolved in real life, sitting on the edge looking in, with his only connections seeming to be with his little sister Julie and his university friend Stelling. When a student he has admired from afar goes missing, he is upset, but he graduates, moves to London and goes on to become a successful Fleet Street journalist.

The whole book is supposed to be Engleby's journal, but it doesn't read like a journal and I was surprised when the psychiatrist mentioned how Engleby's journal had helped him to understand him. I would have been more convinced by the journal if the book said that he had written it while in the special hospital, looking back on his life.

I had a problem believing in Jennifer's diary and letters to her parents. They seems excessively long for a student who had plenty of work, friends and societies to keep her busy. If it wasn't for the lack of mentions of Engleby I would have thought he had made them up himself.

Nottingham Round the World Reading Challenge - UNITED KINGDOM / ENGLAND / CAMBRIDGE