I’ve been ambivalent about President Barack Obama being awarded The Nobel Peace Prize 2009. The main argument against has of course been that he is the leader of a country currently actively involved in two wars, and that he so far hasn’t managed to stop either of them. He has also been president for a very short time.

I’ve still come to the decision that The Nobel Committee has made a correct and bold decision. The prize should not primarily be awarded as a thanks for a job well done, but as an acknowledgement, encouragement, a stamp of approval and a general “get on with it” during a process with goals that the committee approves of.

President Obama, as expected, gave a very good speach at the award ceremony in Oslo.
Rolfn wordled Obamas’ Nobel speach and the full text of the speach can be found here:

There hasn’t been as much talk about the speach of Thorbjørn Jagland, the leader of The Nobel Committee, but I thought it was really good. So I wordled it and the full text can be found here:

The Internet is big, maybe not compared to outer space, but at least compared to most other things I have to deal with on a daily basis. Here’s a good illustration of the current situation online:

Created by Online Education

Thanks to jill/txt.

I don’t feel that I’m reading much these day, but when I look in my reading log I’m doing much better than a few years ago.

So here goes, a list of my reading the last 2 months, with short comments and links to the books on LibraryThing:

• Graceling by Kristin Cashore – good fantasybook with a really tough female hero.
• Full pott i hjerter by Svein Børge Hoftun – OK youth novel.
• Steffen tar sin del av ansvaret by Christian Støre Valeur – quite funny book about a young man suffering emotional and environmental anguish, reminds me of Naiv.Super and other books by Erlend Loe.
• Noe i meg er sterkere enn jeg by Astrid Høgevold – very good autobiographical book about growing up suffering from anorexia.



• Tatt av kvinner (Eon 5) by Lars Lauvik – Eon is my favourite cartoon. Cartoons don’t come much more crazy and hilarious than this.
• Nervous conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga – very good novel about growing up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 60’s.
• Opp i flammer / Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins – great second book in The Hunger Games series.
• The Blue Girl by Charles de Lint – good youth fantasy novel. I like Charles de Lint and his urban fantasy novels, I should read more by him.
• Song for Eirabu – Slaget på Vigrid by Kristine Tofte – really good fantasy novel with a norse mythology setting.
• The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway – great science-fiction-, coming of age-, war-, love- and friendshipnovel. I love this.
• Even Money by Dick Francis – I picked this up from the left behind shelf at our Gran Canaria hotel. With Dick Francis you know what you get and that’s ok for a lazy, sunny day.
• The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss – fantasy-hero-novel which is a bit different since it’s the hero himself telling the story. It’s the first in a serie and I think I’ll read the next one too.
• The Ask and The Answer (Chaos Walking 2) by Patrick Ness – I didn’t like this one quite as much as the first book, “The Knife of Never Letting Go“, but then I liked the first book a lot. I’ll read the next book too.
• Bone 3 – Åndesirklene by Jeff Smith. Good ending to the Bone-series. Great drawings, interesting character and a suspenseful story.

We are just back from my first meeting with charter tourism, and I’ve made some observations about charters and travelling in general:

• Charterplanes are awful. The rows are too close together, meant for domestic 50-minute jumps and put into service on planes taking 5-6 hour trips. Ouch!
• StarTour take good care of their travellers. I don’t mind beeing a sheep as long as I don’t have to be one all the time.
• It’s nice living in a good hotell with a big veranda, nice pool and lots of sunbeds.
• It’s a marvellous luxury to have someone do the cleaning for you. Our wish-souvernir from Gran Canaria: Carmen – who even organized a book shelf for our books.
• Playa del Inglés and Maspalomas have great looking sand dunes, beaches and a shopping center with a model of the Røros Church on the roof, but apart from that it’s mostly hotels and things like that and not much to look at.
• Food poisoning is no fun at all.
• Gran Canaria has lots of nice things to see and I admire the bus drivers that can manouvre a bus on the narrow and very winding roads.
• The IslandTour-Guides (danish and swedish) talked a mix of Danish and Swedish and supposed – probably correctly – that the Norwegians would understand most of it anyway.
• Spanish road maintenance workers are gregarious creatures always observed moving about in groups of at least 5 or 6 together (example: 2 shovel sand, 2 drives the wheelbarrows and empty the sand at the appropriate spot, 1 is watching the others).
• Neither Kristin nor I can haggle at all.
• There is an elderly Irish gentleman with bad legs and a fondness for alcohol who thinks I’m beautiful. That’s always nice.
• Gay couples spotting is an interesting activity for a lesbian couple on vacation. At our hotel we had roughtly 45%/45% of middelage to elderly German straight couples and gay couples from different countries. The remaining 10% was singles from different countries (lots of gay men), about 2 kids and 1 lesbian couple from Norway (us). Our (usually nonfunctioning) gaydar was busy all over Playa del Ingles and silent on the island trips. We didn’t observe a single lesbian couple that we were sure about. Ding, ding, ding…!
• We buy a lot more liquor than we drink!
• 20-25 degrees centigrade is a lovely temperature.
• People who prefer sightseeing or reading in the shade don’t get much of a tan. The Germans obviously had other preferences. We were the palest people at our hotel but didn’t stand out on the flight back home to Bergen.
• To demand that someone gets up at 0515 in the morning to get on the plane home should be included in the UN definition of torture and outlawed. To get up at the same time to get on a plane TO your vacation destination is a totally different matter.
• Playing you own karaoke-cd’s for you passengers should be a reason to be fired, particularly when it’s 0600 in the morning and you can’t even sing in tune! To seek confirmation about you singing abilities by constantly saying “good, eh?” shoud be a suing offence!
• Vacations are great for reading, we should have many more of these!
• One week of vacation is not enough, but a lot better than nothing.

Unedited pictures from the trip on Flickr.

Most days I can read about all the bad news of the world without it making too much of an impression. If I get upset over everything bad I hear about I’d always be walking around with tears in my eyes, but as I’ve mentioned I’m usually able to maintain my fairly good mood.

But not always….
- Today I read about the Taliban war against education in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and education for girls in particular. Several hundred schools for girls and some schools for boys have been bombed the last few years. Everyone get scared of course, the students, the teachers and the parents, and the result is that the girls aren’t allowed to go to school or have no school to go to. There have also been attacs on women at the university in Islamabad and on women in general. In my opinion secular education for both women and men are one of the cornerstones when it comes to building a society which is good to live in for all, so I think this is really tragical. Not much I can do except supporting organisations that are trying to bring education to everyone all over the world.

- The voters in Maine just said no to same sex marriage. Again the majority wants heterosexual marriage to have all the benefits. It’s nok like gays and lesbians in Maine wants special right for their relationships, they just want equal rights. Again, not much I can personaly do except writing blog posts and and show in my personal life that lesbians aren’t much stranger than straight people, and Norway can keep on being an example of a country functioning just fine with a sex-neutral marriage law.

- There has been a new massacre where a person (almost always a man…?) have shot and killed or hurt a lot of other people. What’s the point? I just don’t get it!

- Has there been any suicide bombings today? I don’t know, there are so many of them that they all get muddled.

At least some good things happens too and get reported.
- Someone (The Humane Society) is taking care of an otherwise healthy puppy born without front legs, and they are trying to make some kind of gadget to help her walk.
- A lady in South Korea just passed the theoretical part of her driving exam, on the 950th try! Now she just has to pass the driving part of the exam. I hope the lady is better at the practical part than the theory, otherwise the traffic of South Korea can get really dangerous for some time. (If she drives as lethally as Else in Pondus it’s definitely not safe to be anywhere near her.)

Many, many weeks ago my friend Hege challenged me with this list.

The directions:

“Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.

The list with my marks and snarks, favourites got a capital X:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling  X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible – x (at a time when I actually tried to believe in this nonsense)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell  x
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman  X
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien  X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger  X
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell  x
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald  x
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams  X
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (does it count that I got to page 50 about 6 times?)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck  X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll  x
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame  x
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens  x
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis  x
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis  x
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini  X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne  X
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell  x
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown  x (Yes, but I still have no idea why.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving  X
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery  x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood   x
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding  x (Hated it intensely, school has a lot to answer for)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert   x
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon  x (kept hoping it would improve and live up to a promising start, but noooo…)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley  x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon  X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez  x
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck  X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas  x
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding  x
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville  (I’m not American and this is not on any “must read” lists around here)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker   x
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett  x
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson  x
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransom
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt  (I tried, I tried…)
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens  x
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell  x
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker  X
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams  x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute  X
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare – x  (Didn’t I see The Complete Works of Shakespeare furher up on this list? Anyway, I’ve giggled my way through Hamleg and Macbeth – fans of Terry Pratchett probably understand the giggling bit)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl  x
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

40 total, as a part of my ongoing struggle not to be like most people I consider this a decent number. There are some on the list that I’ve started but not even gotten to page 50, and there are a few I’d really like to read at some point. In general I prefer modern literature to Jane Austen and her crowd.  The challenge have been forwardet to Silje who blogs at Tanks High School and Bergen Maritime High School.

I enjoy reading P.Z. Myers’ blog Pharyngula. He’s sharp, funny and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Sometimes he even post funny (or cute) photos.