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:-)Ī very cute story about overcoming fears and making friends. His mom says he could use a little help with comprehension.and grandpa has asked to join in the discussion too since could use a little help in that area as well.
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For his first club meeting, he has chosen this graphic novel. My grandson, who is a first grader and an avid new reader was a bit jealous that his mother, aunt and I are in a book club together, so he asked if he could be included in our monthly Zoom meetings. :-) A very cu Mother-daughters-grandson-book-club read for February, 2022. Tunglið saves its authors from this delusion.Mother-daughters-grandson-book-club read for February, 2022. Writing a book is, for some writers, a deluded attempt at immortality. They both love and hate that books “strive for permanence”, and how we attempt to “reconcile ourselves with impermanence by making permanent things”. The core question still remains: why? “There’s a contradiction at the centre of things,” they tell me, “and so it is with Tunglið”. We just try to do what feels right, funny or beautiful, or preferably all three.” “This might look like a contradiction,” they continue. “Everyone is welcomed,” they stress – but they do acknowledge that making their books scarce is fundamental to what they do. “The printed book is a democratic object,” they argue, but one being “pushed to the margins” as some publishers are trying to save the book “by turning it into a luxury item” a desirable object prized for its commercial value rather than its contents.īut aren’t Tunglið’s small print runs and book burnings undemocratic, because they limit who can access their books? “Democratic,” they tell me, “doesn’t mean limitless abundance or unlimited supply – but it should mean fair process.” Their books are cheap, cannot be pre-ordered and no one can jump the queue at their events – fair, in other words. They want to keep these challenging books available, whether it be Icelandic poet Óskar Árni Óskarsson’s Cuban Diary from 1983 or Ólafsson’s own Letters from Bhutan. Unsurprisingly, they describe their publishing list as “unconventional” – books that are hard to classify.
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Instead, the procedure has to do with the politics of the book itself. They claim the burnings “have nothing to do with history, censorship or politics”. They assure me that they burn books “with a lot of care and respect, using only first-grade French cognac to help to fuel the flames”. At their sole incineration outside Iceland – in Basel, Switzerland – they had a difficult time persuading the locals that this was “a poetic act, not a political one”. One topic they do take (somewhat) seriously is the artistic nature of their book burnings. Is this all a satire, then, of publishing and capitalism in general? Not really Ólafsson and Hjartarson’s “aim is not to make any point … We tend not to take the rules of the game too seriously so in that way, it might seem satirical.” Asking about their anti-profit business model, I am corrected: “Tunglið is not a business, so there is no business model.” use only first-grade French cognac to help to fuel the flames.
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Jokes and not taking publishing too seriously seem integral to Tunglið. Hjartarson and Ólafsson asked to be quoted as a “dual entity”, joking that they must toe a “party line”. Ragnar Helgi Ólafsson (left) and Dagur Hjartarson.