Skip to main content

Reading report for October 2011

I finished a total of 10 books in October, which means that my reading index is slightly up, although it has not yet reached last year’s monthly average. In addition there was one Did Not Finish, which was rather unfortunate as it sounded very interesting when I was offered it for reviewing.

The books were a mixed bag of various genres, and I have reviewed no less than four of them. One review is already published (in 2 parts) and three more are coming up in the next couple of weeks, starting tomorrow.

Mary Balogh, Colleen Gleason, Susan Krinard, Janet Mullany :Bespelling Jane Austen. 4 paranormal romance novellas, 2 historical, 2 contemporary.
Jim Crace: The Devil's Larder. Short stories with a food theme.
Carola Dunn: Death at Wentwater Court. Cosy murder mystery; historical.
Rachel Gibson: Daisy's Back in Town. Romance, contemporary.
Kay Hooper: Lady Thief/Masquerade. 1 volume, 2 historical romances (1 short novel, 1 novella)
Michael Innes: Appleby's End. Mystery.
Nathaniel Philbrick: In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. History.
Carmen Posadas: Little Indiscretions. Crime, literary novel.
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, read by Stephen Fry. YA fantasy, audiobook. Reread.
Thornton Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Literary novel, historical.

DNF: The Undertaker by William Brown. 
I got sent this book for review and gave it the 25% test (the Kindle equivalent of the 50-page test for books with no pagination) before deciding that while the premise of the story is interesting and it is well-written, the style is not to my taste and I simply couldn’t work up enough sympathy for the narrator-hero to want to see what happens to him. However, others have given it good reviews, so don’t pass it on just because I didn’t like it enough to finish it.

As usual, I am reading Too Many Books At Once. Take a look:
Children of Kali by Kevin Rushby.Travelogue and history.
Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey
The Oxford Book of Oxford, edited by Jan Morris. History. Bathroom book that I expect to finish by mid-2012.
London: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd. History.
The Mysterious West, edited by Tony Hillerman. Short mystery stories set in the western USA.
Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon.Adventure tale.
Nul Points by Tim Moore. Travelogue/biography. Examination of what happened to the people unfortunate enough to come last in the Eurovision Song Contest with zero points.

These are just the ones I have read something in during the last week. I have about a dozen more I haven’t touched for weeks or months which are in various stages of being read. When I come out of a reading slump I tend to do it with a rush.

Comments

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

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

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme