Skip to main content

Look at what I got!

I've been a bad, bad girl and bought me some books. The attempt to diminish the TBR stack by buying only books I strictly think I might keep has flown out the window. The TBR challenge, however, is still on, although it has slowed to a crawl.

I give you last week's book haul:



I love travelogues and like to read about foreign countries and I also like to read memoirs, especially those of people in interesting jobs and/or exotic locations. Therefore I was quite thrilled to find a number of such books. There was a travelogue about Paraguay (At the Tomb...), a country I have hitherto only visited once before in a book (Greene's Travels with my Aunt) and a book describing France - a country I think I should know more about since I am learning the language and am about to reach the step of deciding whether or not to splurge on a month of language school in the country. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom of course combines memoir and travelogue and although I have an ebook edition of it I felt like reading it in physical book form. The Carter memoir just looked like good fun.

History is another of my favourite genres and I hope that A History of the Scottish People lives up to my expectations for a good read.

I have had the sushi book recommended to me by more than one person and it was a piece of good luck to find it. The French cookery book was just irresistible - I love big cookbooks - and apparently this is one of those cookbooks that chefs speak of with deference as one of the ultimate French cookbooks. I'm looking forward to reading it.

As for the novels, I have been planning to read Their Eyes Were Watching God for some time, and Vonnegut is always a good read. I have been slowly accumulating his books through the years and haven't been disappointed in any of them yet. The Alchymist's Journal and The Magical Christmas Cat, represent two genres I find irresistible: historical novels and Christmas stories.

It will be interesting to see when I get around to reading any of these books, but some of them will probably get read quite soon because my mother will definitely want to borrow some of them.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...
25 comments
Read more

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...
9 comments
Read more