Skip to main content

My November and December book haul, pt. 1

Here are the books I bought in the last week of November and the first three weeks of December. 
I've already posted the books I got for Christmas, but here are the rest - well, part of them anyway. I decided to break this up into two posts because there are so many books.

First photo:
  • Johannes Cabal the Necromancer is one I decided I wanted to read when I first heard of it, but then  never got round to doing it.  
  • The Love Child and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter both looked intriguing, for vastly different reasons.  
  • The Second Book of General Ignorance I got because I have the first and I'm a fan of QI.  
  • Seaworthy I got because I love Linda Greenlaw's writing, and  
  • The Complete Stories of Dorothy L. Sayers because I love her writing as well. 
Only Greenlaw's book is new. The rest are second hand, although some of them look like they have never been read.



Second photo:
The books in both photos below are all second hand, although I suspect at least a couple of them have never been read.   

  • Gönguleiðir á Íslandi is the first in a series of book describing interesting hiking routes in Iceland, and this one happens to cover the part of the country where I live. Since I am trying to get into better shape, and indeed must exercise daily in order to burn off some of the carbs my body can't metabolise properly because of my diabetes, so this book is going to get used when the summer arrives. Until then, I am planning to participate in a series of walks that will allow me to explore a beautiful nature area north of Reykjavík with a guide.
  • Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler contains translations of two Spanish picaresque novels that I started to read several years ago and then had to return to the library before I was able to finish them.
  • The guide book is self-explanatory.
  • Unfinished Tales is a welcome addition to my small collection of Tolkienana.
  • Green Grass, Running Water sees to be just the kind of magical tale I love to read, and  
  • The Tower promises to be a cracking thriller with supernatural elements.


Third photo:
  • My Family and Other Animals is one of my most reread books of all time. I decided it was time to get a new copy, since my old one is getting quite tatty.
  • The Consolations of Philosophy seems like a good introduction to the everyday uses of philosophy. 
  • Fimm fingra mandlan is a book of translated short stories by a Swedish author and seems like just my cup of tea.
  • The Snow Geese is a travelogue and those are like catnip to me.
  • I have hopes that The Big Little Book of Pilates will help me understand the Pilates system better and know what the hell I am doing the next time I decide to participate in a Pilates class.
  • At Home in Mitford seems like just the kind of book my mother would enjoy. Who knows, I might too...



Comments

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

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

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