Reading report for March 2008

In March I finished reading 10 books. Most I had started reading as far back as December of last year, so page-wise I am definitely below average.

One, Guards! Guards!, was a perennial reread (I am now reading the City Watch story arc within the Discworld series), and another, Metamorphosis, was a partial reread.

Metamorphosis was also my classic of the month. The Voyage of the Beagle will have to wait another couple of months for that honour, as I decided to read The Canterbury Tales in April and an Icelandic Saga in May – I haven’t decided which one, but possibly Laxdæla saga or a couple of the shorter ones.

I am working on some reviews and will post them when they are ready.

The books:
Eurydice: Satyricon U.S.A. (article collection): 2+
Tony Hillerman: Skinwalkers and Listening Woman (mysteries): 4 & 3+
Katie MacAlister: A Girl's Guide To Vampires (paranormal romance): 2+
John D. Macdonald: One Fearful Yellow Eye (mystery): 4
Harry G. Nickles: Foods of the World: The Cooking of the Middle-East (cuisine and cooking): 3
Ovid : Metamorphosis (classic, myths): 4+
Terry Pratchett: Guards! Guards! (fantasy mystery): 4+
Nora Roberts: Sanctuary (romantic thriller): 3+
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: Cat's Cradle (satire): 4

Comments

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Reading in Reykjavík

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