Skip to main content

Reading report for June and July 2008

The period from the last week of June, the whole of July and the first week of August was an incredibly busy time for me. First came a 3 week intensive summer school in Croatia, during which time I read only 3 books, then a 12 day stop at home, followed by a 10 day holiday in the USA, during which I read a total of 1 book. I am surprised that I managed to read as many as of 16 books in June and July, but of course most of them were June reads.

Of the June books, 2 were rereads.

Books I read in June:
B.M. Gill: Seminar for Murder
Nick Hornby: High Fidelity
Linda Howard ofl.: Under the Boardwalk
Tim Moore: Spanish Steps
J.D. Robb: Betrayal in Death & Interlude in Death
Margaret Truman: Murder in the Smithsonian

Rereads in June:
Jennifer Crusie: Anyone but you & Bet me

Books I read in July:
Polly Evans: On a Hoof and a Prayer
Georgette Heyer: Powder and Patch & April lady
Timothy Holme: The Neapolitan Streak
Hrafn Jökulsson : Þar sem vegurinn endar
Jerry Stanley: Children of the dust bowl

Reread in July:
Georgette Heyer: The Unknown Ajax

Comments

Anonymous said…
Enjoying your comments on mystery series and writers. Did you know that Ronald Knox also had a famous list of rules for mystery writers?

Jim McCullough
Greensboro, NC
Bibliophile said…
Thank you. I don't know about Knox's list. I did some googling and found the rules here:http://www.writingclasses.com/InformationPages/index.php/PageID/303

While they are not much different from Van Dine's rules, there are some interesting differences in the forbidden plot elements.

Popular posts from this blog

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...

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 ...

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...