Skip to main content

Reading report for August 2010

I finished 15 books in August. Of those, I had started reading two more than a month ago – one in June and one probably at some time near the beginning of the year.

I had an attack of reader’s block in the middle of the month. I would begin a book, only to abandon it after only one reading session in order to begin a new book, or I would read a chapter here and a chapter there in the books I am reading "at leisure", never reading more than 10 or so pages of each book each time. I finally did find a book to settle down with and then it was as if a reading machine had been turned on and I read 5 books in three days, all of them around 300 pages long.

4 of my August books were rereads:
  • Jennifer Crusie: Getting Rid of Bradley (contemporary romance)
  • J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban (fantasy)
  • J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (fantasy)
  • J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix (fantasy)

These were the only books that did not belong to a challenge of some sort.

As to the rest, all 5 non-fiction books are part of a mini-challenge to read more non-fiction; 5 books were part of the perpetual TBR challenge; 2 were Top Mystery challenge reads; 2 were Bibliophilic Book Challenge reads; and 1 was a Global reading Challenge book. Since this comes to a total of 19, it should be obvious that some books were part of more than one challenge.

The books:
  • Connie Brockway: My Dearest Enemy (historical romance)
  • Jack Finney: Time and Again (time travel)
  • Peter Haining: The Classic Era of Crime Fiction (literary history)
  • Carol Livingston: Gecko Tails: A Journey through Cambodia (travelogue)
  • John D. MacDonald: The Dreadful Lemon Sky (mystery thriller)
  • Ellis Peters: The Devil's Novice (historical mystery)
  • Will Randall: Botswana Time (travelogue) - will post review in September
  • Rannveig Tómasdóttir: Andlit Asíu (travelogue)
  • Ernesto Sabato: The Tunnel (Spanish: El tunel) (literary novel)
  • Jane Smiley: Charles Dickens (biographical study)
  • Patricia Wentworth: Miss Silver Comes to Stay (mystery) - will post review in September

Comments

George said…
Rereading? What's that? With my Read Real Soon pile of books reaching skyward, I rarely reread books. And, when I do reread a book (something I do maybe once or twice a year) it takes a very compelling reason.
Dorte H said…
And I thought I did well with ten books! Well, perhaps it is because I also wrote quite a bit.

Plotwise, my best August read was definitely "My Soul to Take". Marvelous crime novel.
Bibliophile said…
George, some readers do, and others don't. I guess we fall into different categories ;-)
You did so well! I read 8!


Here is my August Wrap Up post!

Popular posts from this blog

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

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...

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...