Iceland - LoveStar - Andri Snær Magnason

This was a perfect holiday book, a week in the sun with the family. I managed to sneak a few hours of reading in each day and was engrossed in LOVESTAR. Some of the quoted praise for the book compared the author to Orwell, Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, which piqued my interest as they are some of my favourite authors. However, I think that was just some lazy reviewing. Don't get me wrong, the book is great and deals with a light-hearted weird dystopian future, buts that's where the comparisons end.

This does tick some of the boxes of the types of books I wanted to discover when setting out on reading books from authors from all around the world. It was originally written in Icelandic, set in Iceland and touches on Icelandic culture and history.

The story it's self has some pretty fun and slightly disturbing visions of the future. One thing that I didn't particularly like was the way it went to huge amounts of detail about how the technology in the future was developed. This is a personal preference and not a dig at the book. Im happy to accept technology. If I want to know more I'm sure there's a Wikipedia page about that piece of invented tech. 

The book is a super easy read, nice and relaxed, with moments of comedy, and tragedy. The chapters were quite short which always encourages me to read more and more of the book as I always wanted to know what happened next. I wasn't too impressed with the ending of the book, as it seemed quite flawed, and wrapped things up a little too neatly. But again I quite like to finish a book thinking, 'but what about them?', or 'did they find what they were looking for?'

This book is probably aimed at a more general audience rather than just the science fiction audience.

Podcast link:

https://anchor.fm/andy-parry/episodes/SFATW---001---Iceland---LOVESTAR---Andri-Snr-Magnason-e20b9i0