Reading report for June 2012

If you have been wondering why there have been so few posts this month, it‘s because I have been reading: voraciously, almost manically. I finished 17 books in June, reading most of them from cover to cover within the month. Three of them were rereads, the In the Garden trilogy by the fabulous Nora Roberts, who is also my most read author of the month. 13 of the books were romances, with a 14th being romantic but lacking the clear-cut happy ending of the others. Of the rest, two were mysteries, one of them a short story collection and the other the first book in the series. Lastly I read one book on language history.

The best read of the month was Morgan Matson‘s Amy and Roger's Epic Detour, a romantic coming-of-age epistolary road novel for young adults. It reaches into picaresque territory, with the eponymous characters going on a road trip across the USA and taking a route not sanctioned by the adults who planned it for them, doing things they aren‘t supposed to do and making discoveries about themselves and others. The writing is fresh and it takes you to several interesting places around the USA, besides containing some cool music playlists that could be fun to recreate.

The discovery of the month was the Black Dagger Brotherhood urban fantasy series by J.R. Ward. They are so very addictive that I read four of them back to back, three in June and one in July. Once you get over how badly the first one, Dark Lover, is written, it‘s difficult to stop. The writing improves book by book, the world-building is fantastic and keeps getting more and more involved and detailed with each book, the romances are blazing hot and the fight scenes not as sketchy as they often are in romantic suspense/thrillers. I am trying to back away from reading all of them one after the other, as I would like to stretch out my reading of them.

News of the month is that I finally got a Kindle and discovered that I actually read faster on one than I do from a book, much as I do from a computer screen. As a result, the TBR challenge has suffered, with only 2 TBR books finished in June. Even if I had not got the Kindle, I think the TBR challenge would have suffered anyway, because I keep discovering more books my grandmother owned that I am unable to resist taking for my own, so the stack continues to swell. I am therefore changing tack and abandoning the idea of reducing the stack down to a fixed number and will instead aim to read at least 50 TBR books – newly added or old relics – from the stack in 2012. I have already finished 20 and there are six months left of the year, so it will be a realistic goal while still being a challenge.

The Books:

Rachel Gibson: Tangled Up in You. Romance, contemporary.
Molly Harper: How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf. Romance, contemporary, paranormal.
Michael Innes: Death at the President's Lodging.Mystery, police.
Michael Innes: Appleby Talking.Short mysteries, police.
John Bemelmans Marciano: Anonyponymous.Language history: people whose names have become words in English.
Morgan Matson: Amy and Roger's Epic Detour.Young adult novel.
Patricia Potter: Cassidy and the Princess. Romantic suspense.
Nora Roberts: Command Performance, The Playboy Prince. Romance, contemporary.From a series of 4.
Nora Roberts: Summer Desserts, Lessons Learned. Romance, contemporary. Paired novels.
Nora Roberts: Blue Dahlia, Black Rose, Red Lily. Romance, contemporary.Trilogy.
J.R. Ward: Dark Lover, Lover Awakened, Lover Revealed.Urban fantasy/paranormal romance, suspense. Books 1-3 in a series.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

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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