Independent People. What can I even say about this book? I'm stunned that I even finished it. It took me eight months to read. The text is some sort of facsimile of an older edition; it's small, dark, close-set. Hard to read.

This is technically a narrative. The same way that pitch is technically a liquid, despite the fact that it takes years for a drop of it to fall. It's appropriate that Independent People is so slow-moving; Iceland is the country of glaciers, after all. But it's not the slowness that bothers me. It's the construction of the thing. Dropped plot threads. An utter lack of propulsion. The sudden appearances and disappearances of characters. So much rich interiority of the main characters for no reason—all that's ever front of mind is the status of the sheep, the hay, the horse, the sheep, the floorboards, the sheep, the grass, the sheep, the sheep, the sheep. It is agony.

I am completely baffled how celebrated authors can blurb this as "one of the best books of the twentieth century" (Jane Smiley) or "funny, clever, sardonic, and brilliant" (E. Annie Proulx). I just have to shrug and acknowledge that we all have different tastes, and sheep dung is not mine.

Thank god this one is over.

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Global Challenge: Iceland