Weekly Monday Round-up (November 14, 2016)

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Kathryn at the Book Date and is "a place to meet up and share what you have been, are and about to be reading over the week."

Visit the Book Date to see what various other book bloggers have been up to in the past week.

Books I finished reading last week:
I seem to be out of the reading slump and am reading at full pace. The trick seems to be to not hesitate when choosing the next book, and to get reading right away and read enough to get yourself hooked. (Or maybe I have just been lucky in my choices).

I finished and reviewed (links lead to my reviews):

Common Ground by Rob Cowen. Natural history and meditation on man's place within nature.
Alice by Christina Henry. Fantasy. Dark spin-off of Alice in Wonderland.

I finished and haven't reviewed:

The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich. I may review this one, but in case I don't get round to it, it is a memoir of sorts about the US state of Wyoming, where Ehrlich first started visiting in the 1970s. She first came there to make a documentary about sheep farming, but kept returning and learned both shepherding and cowboying before she eventually got married and settled down on a ranch with her husband. It's the kind of book about a place and the people and animals that occupy it that I love to read.
The Pillow Book: An Illustrated Celebration of Eastern Erotica, edited by Charles Fowkes. This is an anthology/sampler of erotic writing and art from India, China and Japan that I acquired at the same time as The Perfumed Garden.
The audio book of A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie, read by Rosemary Leach.
Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis. Self-help and etiquette, humorous. A tongue in book of advice for single women on how to enjoy their singledom.
Single Female (Reluctantly) Seeks by Dixie Browning. Romance.

I am currently waiting for one book to arrive in the mail:

Rivers of London by Ben Aaranovitch. This is the first book in a fantasy/alternate reality detective series and was recommended to me as a book that other Terry Pratchett fans have enjoyed.

...and dithering about whether or not to order another:

Red Queen by Christina Henry.

I forgot to post about the books I acquired the week before last, so here is a double dose.

I have already read four of them and have started on a fifth.
Click to enlarge the photos so you can see the titles.

I'll be writing about them later in the week.

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...

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...

Reading in Reykjavík

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