Skip to main content

Signing-up post for the 2016 What's in a Name reading challenge

Apropos of yesterday’s first post I decided to sign up for the What's in a Name reading challenge. 
I have mostly been reading loan books and ebooks lately, while my TBR stack has been swelling and threatening to take over my library (it's currently at around 40% of my books), Therefore I decided to try to read as many books from my TBR stack of physical books as possible.



Guess what? I found books that fit all the categories!

Below is a list of the possible reads. First you see the category and then a list of books.The ones in parentheses are ebooks, but I will only resort to those if I find the others uninteresting, boring or otherwise unreadable. I have bolded the ones I am most inclined to read, but that doesn’t put the others out of the running. My mood may, after all, have changed once I get to them. Once I have finished a particular category, I will strike out the category and underline the book I chose.

The rest of the rules and guidelines can be found on the hosting website.

If you have any suggestion or recommendation as to which of these books I should read, please post it in the comments section.

  • A country: Long Ago in France by M.F.K. Fisher; Skating to Antarctica by Jenni Diski; The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham; Cuba - The Land of Miracles: A Journey Through Modern Cuba by Stephen Smith; Full Tilt: Ireland to India by Bicycle OR  Muddling Through in Madagascar by Dervla Murphy; Show me the Magic: Travels Around Benin by Taxi by Annie Caulfield
  • An item of clothing: Dress and Undress by Paul Tabori; The Bloodied Cravat by Rosemary Stevens; The Affair of the Mutilated Mink by James Anderson;
  • An item of furniture: How to Make Bookshelves & Cabinets by Sunset Books (probably not the most scintillating of reads, but I’m planning to make some built-in bookshelves and I need to read this); The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence; A Piano in the Pyrenees by Tony Hawks; Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie; The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart
  • A profession: Billy Budd, Foretopman by Herman Melville; The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany: The Once and Future King by T.H. White; What the Butler Saw: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of the Servant Problem by E. S. Turner; The Coming of the King by Nikolai Tolstoy; The Death of the King’s Canary by Dylan Thomas and John Davenport; Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West by Anne Seagraves; Ashenden, or the British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham; Adventures of a Cameraman by Wallace Kirkland; Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham; All Fishermen are Liars by Linda Greenlaw
  • A month of the year: April Lady by Georgette Heyer; (An April Shroud by Reginald Hill); (August Heat by Andrea Camilleri)
  • A title with the word ‘tree’ in it: Lucifer: The wolf beneath the tree; The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd, A Parrot in the Pepper Tree by Chris Stewart
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

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...
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