Skip to main content

Reading report for December 2012

I finished the year 2012 with a more-than average reading month, finishing 16 books, most of which were begun as well as ended within the month. It's no wonder, since because of the way the weekends lined up the Yule holidays were long this year – I only worked one day between December 22nd and January 2nd because traditionally, in my workplace, we get the half-workdays of Christmas Eve and New Year‘s Eve completely off, as well as one extra winter vacation day over the holidays.

12 of these books were romances and 7 were written by Nora Roberts. Romances are a good genre for me during the darkest winter months, dealing as they do with positive feelings and happy endings, things I need as ammunition in my battle with depression, which is exacerbated by seasonal affective disorder at this time of the year. The rest included true and fictional crime, historical fiction and a cookbook.

The Books:
  • Dorothy H. Becker & Nancy S. Wallace : Fabulous Fondues. Cookbook.
  • Debbie Macomber: Christmas Wishes: Christmas Letters (2007); Rainy Day Kisses (1990). Christmas romance novellas.
  • Ed McBain: The Pusher. Police procedural.
  • Terry Pratchett: Dodger. Historical fiction/alternative reality.
  • Julia Quinn‘s The Bridgertons: The Duke and I; The Viscount Who Loved Me; Romancing Mr. Bridgerton; To Sir Philip, With Love. Historical romances.
  • Katherine Ramsland: The Devil's Dozen: How cutting edge forensics took down 12 notorious serial killers. True crime/Forensic history.
  • Nora Roberts‘ The Donovan Legacy: Captivated; Entranced; Charmed; Enchanted.
  • Nora Roberts‘ The Concannon Sisters trilogy: Born in Fire; Born in Ice; Born in Shame. Paranormal romance.

(This month I have already read 12 books, all of them romances and all by Nora Roberts - I was only going to read one 6-book series, but discovered that they were linked to two other series, and now I have discovered that one of those is connected to another two book sequence, so it very much looks like I will fill my Nora quote for the year in the first two weeks of January).



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

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

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
Post a Comment
Read more