Meme: Top Ten Books I Hope Santa brings

Top Ten Tuesdays is a meme organised by The Broke and the Bookish. Visit them and click on the links to visit some of the other participating blogs to see more Christmas wish lists.

To compile this list I took a look at my Book Depository and BookMooch wish lists and decided which books I would like to most to get for Christmas. These are mostly wishlist books I can’t get from the library and am unlikely to get through BookMooch, plus a couple of new or newish books I can’t wait to read. There are no Icelandic books on the list, but I am looking forward to reading the latest books by Arnaldur Indriðason (which my parents will in all likelihood get for Xmas) and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (which one of my friends will buy for herself if she doesn’t get it for Xmas), and several other Icelandic authors not known in other countries.

1. The Songs of Love and Death anthology. This has stories by several of my favourite authors.
2. The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais. Foodie read - I love those.
3. Just Kids by Patti Smith. I have been wanting to read this since I first heard of it. Patti Smith rocks!
4. August Heat by Andrea Camilleri. I am following this series.
5. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan.
6. The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby.
7. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson. Loved the movie, would love to read the book.
8. Vol. 1 of the Questionable Content comic book by Jeph Jacques. My favourite web comic.
9. Knife Skills Illustrated: A User's Manual by Peter Hertzmann. One for the kitchen.
10. Any Culinaria book I don’t have, especially the ones on Italy, Spain, France and China. These are gorgeous coffee-table books full of photos, recipes and information.

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

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went and

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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