Weekly Monday Round-up (November 21, 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:

Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann. Historical novel. I'm working on a review.
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. Fantasy police procedural, set in modern London. I'm working on a review.
What the Butler Saw: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of the Servant Problem by E.S. Turner. This is an informative account of life in service in England (and America) and a look at the upstairs-downstairs dichotomy.

Books I acquired last week:

I will discuss them in more detail later in the week.

Weather report:
We had the first frost in the Reykjavík area last week, with a little snow, which then melted and re-froze. The slippery pavements are preventing me from walking at my usual speed on my daily walks. Instead I am sort of shuffling along, trying to stay on my feet. If this keeps up I will either have to lengthen my walks from 5 km to 7 km a day to get in the same exercise, or join a gym so I can use a treadmill. Or maybe I'll start swimming instead. The hot pools here are a lovely, lovely way to end an hour of exercise.

Other things I did last week:

A meringue so shiny it looks like a blob of mayonnaise.

Baked sugar-free meringues. I'm diabetic and therefore sugar is EVIL and I wanted to try a recipe I found for sugarless meringues, using sucralose (Splenda). They were the whitest, shiniest meringues I have ever seen, but tasted horrible, metallic and nasty, and ended up in the trash. Next I'm trying with erythritol, which has less of an after-taste.

Ordered three books from the Book Depository - the follow-up to Rivers of London and a later book in the series that was on sale, and a hardcover edition of the Science of Discworld IV. I figured it might not be available in hard covers for much longer and since my copies of volumes I-III are all in hard covers I decided this one had better be as well.

Ordered two new pairs of eyeglasses. My eyesight finally seems to have stabilised after getting messed up by the diabetes and I decided to order one pair of progressives and another single vision pair to use as sunglasses.

Booked a flight to Frankfurt, Germany for a long weekend in December. I'm taking my mother with me and we are driving to Heidelberg and staying there and going to the Christmas market.

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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