Reading report for July 2012

I finished 14 books and 2 novellas in July, all but one of which I started reading within the month, so the page count is impressive, around 5400 pages, not counting those parts of London: The Biography I read earlier. You could say I‘m making up for lost time, having read very little (for me) during the winter.

Of the books I read in July, I have already reviewed London: The Biography . Not unsurprisingly, 3 of the other books and one novella came from the Black Dagger Brotherthood series. The other novella takes place in the same world but is not part of the series. Neither novella will go on the Books Read list until I have finished the books they are to be found in, but the titles are Father Mine and The Story of Son. The former is about the couple from Lover Awakened , the third book in the series, and what happened afterwards. The other is a sweet paranormal love story.

Another series I recently discovered Debbie Macomber‘s Cedar Cove books, of which I read the two first in July. They weren‘t as endearing as her Christmas stories, but gave one a nice and cosy, warm feeling, much like the Cat Who books by Lilian Jackson Braun, only without the murders. Although the main theme in these books is love, they are not traditional one man/one woman romances but rather parts of a larger, multi-book story with multiple characters, with one or two love stories being brought to the I do in each book and new ones continued or started.

A third series I have just started reading is the Inspector Lynley mysteries. I was familiar with Lynley and his sidekick Havers from the TV series so I found it rather funny to read the description of Lynley in the book. I have him firmly fixed in my mind as looking like the delicious Nathaniel Parker, the actor who portrays him in the TV series, who is definitely not blond like the Lynley of the books. I have started reading the second book and so far TV Lynley seems to be winning – I still see Parker in my mind whenever I read the name.

I also discovered the Uncle John‘s Bathroom Readers when I came across one in a second hand shop last month. I will definitely be buying more of them.

As for the rest, I read 2 romance novels and a collection of 5 romance novellas, one Ellis Peters mystery, and reread two books, one by Terry Pratchett and one by Piers Anthony. I discovered Anthony‘s Xanth books long ago and enjoyed them up to around book 20 when I decided I‘d had my fill of them. However, I never got rid of my copies, and recently I decided to reread them to help me to decide whether or not I want to keep them.

The Books:
Peter Ackroyd: London: The Biography. History.
Piers Anthony: A Spell for Chameleon. Fantasy. Reread.
Bathroom Reader's Institute: Uncle John's Bathroom Reader: Wonderful World of Odd. Trivia.
Elizabeth George: A Great Deliverance. Police procedural. Murder mystery.
Robin Kaye: Too Hot to Handle. Contemporary romance.
Debbie Macomber: 16 Lighthouse Road and 204 Rosewood Lane. Women‘s literature.
Cathy Maxwell; Elaine Fox; Jeaniene Frost; Sophia Nash; Tracy Anne Warren: Four Dukes and a Devil. Romance, mixture of historical, contemporary and paranormal.
Ellis Peters: Death and the Joyful Woman. Murder mystery.
Terry Pratchett: Reaper Man. Fantasy. Reread.
Nora Roberts: Sacred Sins. Romantic suspense.
J.R. Ward: Lover Unbound , Lover Enshrined and Lover Avenged. Urban fantasy/Paranormal romance.

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...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

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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