Member Reviews
This was a fascinating look into the museums of Iceland with gorgeous illustrations and incredible writing. I enjoyed this experience in lieu of being able to travel to Iceland myself.
This is a beautiful book that highlights and celebrates the quirky. Information is presented with humor. The nature of why humans collect things, why humans display these things, and what makes a museum are interesting questions to consider and ponder. I looked up each location after reading the chapter about it. It's fascinating to think that some of these places exist. This book asks important questions and highlights truly unique institutions in a really beautiful way.
An interesting selection of museums throughout Iceland. While I enjoyed the histories and descriptions of each of the museums, there were times where I felt like it went on a bit too long. All the museums are very interesting and Greene mentions that there was a boom in museums after the 1990s. I think I would have liked to see more museums even with just a little bit of information. Don't get me wrong, the museums that are chosen are very interesting and Greene gives us a detailed and well-written story of each museum's inception, it just would've been nice to read about a larger scope of museums throughout Iceland.
Fascinating content and gorgeous writing! So much artistry on every page. The book is so thoroughly researched and realized I feel like I am on the ground with the author. A really fun read.
Greene gives the book's readers a look into the wild and varied subjects found in Iceland's 265 museums. From the titular Museum of Whales of Iceland to the more mysterious Museum of Prophecies, Greene takes us on a journey through Iceland and its museums, from the notable to the more... obscure.
I found this travelogue of museums in Iceland quirky and charming, ranging from the penis museum with a faux-serious name to a woman's collection of rocks to a man's devotion to stuffed birds. Along the way, with bits of poetic language and humor, the author puts together an intriguing and unusual view of this small island nation, its geography, its hard-scrabble past and its current capacity to support a wide range of eccentricities. Very enjoyable.
This was a really interesting look at some of the unusual museums in Iceland and the weird and serendipitous ways they came about. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who is interested in oddities and unusual collections. As a librarian, it's always interesting to see how people acquire their finds.
If you're the sort of person who's intrigued by this title, then you'll probably like this book. It is charming and beautifully written and delivers a lot of information - both about the museums it describes and Iceland as a whole - in a relatively short amount of space. I really do love how much information this book spans: you get info on the natural world, folklore, history, economics, sea life - it's really staggering how much ground Greene covers here.
If I have anything negative to say it's that Greene occasionally does this thing where she'll throw you into the deep end of a subject without context, and sometimes that pays off nicely, but sometimes it feels more like she took the long way around. Those parts could be a little bit frustrating and confusing, personally.
However, all in all, I thought this was a lovely book. Armchair travelers and people planning off-the-beaten-path trips to Iceland should definitely give this book a read - and if you only know one or two things about Iceland (like I did before reading this) all the more reason to give it a try. It's a really fascinating read.