Reading report for September 2011

You may have noticed that I have been going through a rather bad reviewing slump for the past three or four months, that has gone hand-in-hand with a reading slump. Not that I haven’t been reading, but I have been sticking to re-reads and favourite authors and rejecting one book after another that doesn’t fit into this category.

I think I have finally managed to break out of the reviewing slump - at least I actually find myself interested in reviewing again. I am also clearly in the middle of a turn-around genre-wise. Every few years throughout my reading life I have found myself focusing strongly on a particular genre. For about 6 years now this genre has been that of crime literature, but now I find myself focusing more on romances, adventure and non-fiction. I also find myself longing to re-read old childhood favourites I haven’t thought about in years, and I see no reason why I shouldn’t review them. These include some classic adventure and sea-faring tales, and I also have a couple of non-fiction adventure books I suddenly find myself interested in reading. This goes hand-in hand with my return to school. I am taking a couple of very interesting but demanding university courses in editing and terminology management, which you might think would mean I will have less time to look after my blogs, but as a matter of fact I find that going back to school stimulates my brain and gives me more energy, which in turn means I have more interest in blogging. So that’s a good thing. It’s only personal misfortunes and illness (and I count my periodic descents into depression as illness) that decrease my interest in blogging.

For those of you who mostly come here or originally discovered this blog because of the strong crime literature slant, I hope you will stay even if the content will start to go more in the direction of these other genres. There will always be a few reviews of crime novels - just will not as many - and I will continue to review Icelandic crime novels that are being translated into other languages.

This month’s finished books numbered seven, five of which were rereads. Additionally, I gave up on one brand-new book I was sent for reviewing a couple of months ago, which is a pity because it sounded really interesting and I was all set to enjoy it, but the writing style was not to my liking and so I gave up on it.

The first-time reads were:

Rachel Gibson : Not Another Bad Date . Contemporary romance. The review will post tomorrow.
Georgette Heyer : Sylvester, or The Bad Uncle . Historical romance.

The re-reads:

Georgette Heyer : Lady of Quality , The Corinthian and The Unknown Ajax
J.K. Rowling : Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Audio books, read by Stephen Fry.

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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