Thoughts From Iceland

Thoughts From Iceland - The Complete Collection is a travelogue of a three-day journey to one of Europe's most interesting destinations.  Plus, Iceland's doing well in the European Cup, so I thought I'd read up on the country.  I've been all over Europe, but I haven't been to Iceland, mostly because it's one of the more expensive destinations.  When I was young and doing my travels, I'd rather spend a month in Poland than a half week in Iceland; back then, I had time to kill and not as much money.  Now I have a whole lot of neither.

"Day 1" isn't that interesting to me.  All the narrator, Lonnie Mann, does is go to a few shopping malls and buy the usual tourist crap.  "Day 2" takes him to the Solheimojokull Glacier, which I did find more exciting; however, nothing out of the ordinary happens, aside from him being lonely and getting lost.  That's another reason I like traveling in places like India.  It's impossible to get lost because you can just take a bike-rickshaw wherever you need to go for $0.30 or something.

"Days 3+4" is mostly the narrator hangs around Reykjavik, doing the same sort of stuff.  Lonnie is very skilled at lettering and drawing urban and rural landscapes; this is the highlight of this travelogue for me.  "Trip 2" takes on a different form than the first four-day trip.  It consists of watercolors with prose, mostly not lettered but typed, which is appropriate for the format.

For a title mostly devoid of conflict, Thoughts From Iceland is pretty engaging, and I found myself identifying with Lonnie.  He has a more adventurous palate than I do; he eats whale and fermented shark among other delicacies, while I'd be more comfortable finding a Vietnamese restaurant and eating chicken and rice.  Lonnie gives the reader an immersive feel for what it's like to be a tourist in Iceland but none of what it is like to live in Iceland.  This isn't a weakness, necessarily.  I merely opened this book with different expectations from what I ended up reading.