Reading report for October 2009

I´m back from a great holiday in India.

Here is the reading report for October. I will post the one for November soon, plus a photo of my book acquisitions from India and possibly some reviews.

I only read one Top Mystery in October, and only one Icelandic book, but I did quite well in the TBR challenge, with 7 books altogether.

Árni Gunnarsson (text) and various photographers: Eldgos í Eyjum (documentary)
M.C. Beaton: The Skeleton in the Closet (mystery)
Suzanne Brockmann: Force of Nature (romantic thriller)
Edmund Crispin: Frequent Hearses (murder mystery)
Jasper Fforde: The Well of Lost Plots (futuristic fantasy)
Nicki Grihault: Culture Smart! India (cultural guide)
Thomas Hardy: Under the Greenwood Tree (romantic novel)
HRF Keating: The Murder of the Maharajah (murder mystery)
Sarah Macdonald: Holy Cow! (travelogue)
Ngaio Marsh: Singing in the Shrouds (murder mystery)
Stuart Mclean: Stories from the Vinyl Café (short stories)
Ellis Peters: Death to the Landlords (murder mystery)
Unknown: The Epic of Gilgamesh (classic literature)
Various: Ripley's Believe it or Not (trivia)

Additionally I read large parts of the Lonely Planet Guide to Rajastan, Delhi and Agra.

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...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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