I’ve kinda sort of followed Iceland’s financial collapse without trying very hard to understand it.   The current issue of Vanity Fair features an article by Michael Lewis (Wall Street on the Tundra) which explains it clearly and is a delight to read as well.  Lewis is one of my favorite feature writers.  He’s written on sports and on finance, both subjects I find either boring and/or intimidatingly complex, and he manages to illuminate without being pedantic or unnecessarily detailed.  He’s got a great eye for human  idiosyncrasies  and a gift for metaphor.

He’s also married to Tabitha Sorenson, an MTV VJ in the early 90s, if you’re old enough to remember that.  He’s hilarious when he writes about their family life and his adventures in fatherhood.  They lived in France for a while and in 2000, he wrote a series of vignettes for Slate about it.

I’ve always been fascinated with Iceland – don’t know why.   Although I don’t how it happened, Iceland plays a small but important part in the backstory of my current WIP; the hero’s mother was Icelandic (he thinks).  In the world I’ve built, Iceland is one of the places in which the Old Fae have settled in self-contained communities to avoid contact with humans and the modern world.

In his article, Lewis talks about aluminum giant Alcoa, who built an aluminum smelting plant in Iceland.  They were bemused to discover that before they could begin construction, they had to pay to have a survey done certifying that no “hidden people” – i.e., elves – were living underground.  Quite a few Icelanders sincerely believe in elves.

I like that.

Filed under: Non-romance reading