The annual reading report, part 2

Continuing from yesterday´s post:

Breakdown by genre:

This is by dominant genre, so that, for example, the urban fantasy novels I read all go in the romance category, because they are romances first and foremost, although they happen to take place in fantasy/alternative reality setting, whereas the Discworld books go in the fantasy category even if they are all also detective stories, because fantasy is the dominant genre.

Crime, mystery and thrillers: 54 (31,2%), down by 10,65%
Romance: 49 (28,3%), up by a staggering 21,15%
Fantasy, sci-fi, fairy tales, myths and supernatural: 20 (11,6%), up by 6,5%
Miscellaneous fiction: 32 (18,5%) up by 1,65%
Non-fiction: 18 (10,4%), down by 16,6%

My reading seems to have been more homogeneous in 2010 than it was in 2009, which I blame on the decrease in my reading of non-fiction, down to 10% from 27%.

I did not read enough travelogues and ex-pat memoirs to warrant a separate category in 2010, but I plan to remedy that in 2011, when the travelogues I accumulated in 2010 become eligible for the TBR challenge.

Authors:

I haven‘t tallied the number of books by the gender of the authors before, but I thought it might be interesting to take a look. Such numbers can, however, never be completely accurate, since for one reason or another authors sometimes assume noms de plum belonging to the other sex, or they have names or pseudonyms that are gender neutral.

Several books were by more than one author, including some short story anthologies, so I counted by the number of books rather than the number of authors.
10 (5,8%) anthologies with short stories by both genders ended up in a mixed category. As for the rest:

Female author(s): 107 (61,85%)
Male author(s): 56 (32,35%)

This is nearly twice as many books by women than by men, which actually surprised me (in a nice way). I'd had the impression that I read more books by men than by women.

Author list by number of books read:

As usual, Nora Roberts takes the trophy for the most books read by one author, with Lynn Viehl coming a close second and Jennifer Crusie a close third.

Nora Roberts: 11
Lynn Viehl: 9
Jennifer Crusie: 7
Terry Pratchett: 7
Georgette Heyer, Ngaio March and Ellis Peters: 6 each
J.K. Rowling, Hugleikur Dagsson: 5
Agatha Christie: 4
Edward Gorey, Lori Foster: 3 (the last books I shall ever read by Foster unless someone can point me in the direction of romances by her that do not have virgin heroines)
Dorothy L. Sayers, Halldór Laxness, Jane Feather, Julia Quinn, M.R. James, Sharyn McCrumb, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir: 2 each.

Of course, if I were to count all the little Gorey books collected in those three above-mentioned anthologies, he would win hands down with 47 books in total.

Publishers:
In my last annual report I switched to counting imprints rather than publishing houses, since smaller publishers are continually being swallowed up by bigger ones and what is a publishing house today may tomorrow be one imprint among many belonging to a big publishing house. I did count all the imprints bearing variations of the Penguin and Signet names as one.

As in 2009, Penguin won, but only by 1 book.

Penguin: 10
Signet: 9
St. Martin‘s Press: 8
Jove: 7
Bloomsbury: 6
Berkley Books, Fontana/Collins, Harper Collins, Project Gutenberg, Silhouette Books, Victor Gollancz, Vintage: 5 each, and
15 others with 2 books each, and
47 with 1 book each
Furthermore there were 6 self-published books, all of them e-books.

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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