Skip to main content

Reading report for March 2011

I read 16 books in March, several of which I started reading in a previous month. 6 were TBR challenge books, one a Top Mysteries challenge read, 2 were Gothic Challenge reads, and one a Buchmesse read.

One was an audio-book, Unseen Academicals, which was also a re-read, if you can call listening to audio-books "reading". I suppose you could call it "absorbing", because it is actually more than just listening.  Shortly before I listened to it I had read The Rules of Association Football 1863, a tiny little book that contains a short overview of the history of football and the original rules of the modern game, which  enhanced my enjoyment of Unseen Academicals because quite a lot of that book is taken up by a football game, although it isn‘t, per se, about football.

It looks as if April is going to be another month of finishing up books I started in a previous month, because in the last week I have started reading something like 9 books, and lost interest in all of them once I took a break. I occasionally go through such attention-span problems, but it never lasts very long. Until this one ends I am focusing on short stories so I will at least finish something in each reading session.

The Books:
  • The Rules of Association Football 1863.
  • Louisa May Alcott: Little Women or, Margaret, Jo, Elizabeth and Amy. First time I read this classic from beginning to end in an unabbreviated version. Lovely writing and good storytelling, but a bit too moralistic and preachy for my taste.
  • M.C. Beaton: Death of a Nag. Murder mystery.
  • Bragi Ólafsson: Sendiherrann, ljóð í óbundnu máli (The Ambassador). Literary novel. A disappointment.
  • Daniel Defoe: The King of Pirates. Epistolatory novel that glamorises piracy.
  • Agnès Desarthe: Good Intentions. Literary novel.
  • Neil Gaiman: M is for Magic. Short stories for kids and young adults.
  • Katie MacAlister: Sex and the Single Vampire.Urban fantasy.
  • Léo Malet: 120 Rue de la Gare. Noir murder mystery.
  • Ngaio Marsh: Black as He's Painted. Murder mystery.
  • Ngaio Marsh: Last Ditch. Murder mystery, police procedural.
  • Terry Pratchett: Unseen Academicals.Fantasy.
  • Sanders, Girling, Davies, Sanders: Would You Believe It? Useless information you can't afford to be without. Book of trivia, much of which is out of date, when it isn't plain wrong.
  • Edgar Wallace: The Four Just Men.Thriller.
  • Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto.Gothic novel.
  • Sarah Wendell & Candy Tan : Beyond Heaving bosoms: The Smart Bitches‘ Guide to Romance. Literary handbook.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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
Post a Comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more