Reading report, 30 January 2017

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 last week.
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As for myself, I reread two books last week, and finished one first time read.

The rereads were:

Dogs and Goddesses by Jennifer Crusie, Anne Stuart & Lani Diane Rich. I needed a bit of zany fantasy and this fit the bill perfectly.
Crazy For You by Jennifer Crusie. A nice bit of romantic suspense.

The first time read was Marco Polo's Silk Road: The Art of the Journey. I'll say nothing about it for now, as I intend to review it.

As for other activities, I continued to weight-lift and then went on a long hike yesterday with my hiking group. This was a good 18 km in length, starting out on trails and then going on to trackless, rougher terrain alternating between beaches (sandy/rocky) and terrain composed of very tussocky stretches interspersed with short stretches of very rocky terrain, and then onto roads for couple of kilometres before we reached our cars (the cars are driven to the end-point, and the hikers are taken by bus to the starting point and then they hike back).

I was unlucky enough to forget my phone at home, so I could not track the hike, but my father was with me and he brought a GPS tracker. I also forgot to bring a camera, but never mind: it was cold and quite windy so I buried my head inside the hood of my sweater and that of my down jacket and wrapped a scarf around my neck, with the result that I could barely turn my head and my field of vision was mostly limited to the people walking ahead of me. I could only really look at the landscape when we stopped. I would love to repeat at least the wild part of this hike in good summer weather.

This is part 2 of an 8-part serial hike from Reykjavík to Botnsdalur, a beautiful nature area in Hvalfjörður. We go every second Sunday, and the last hike will take place on the Sunday after Easter Sunday. This suits me just fine, as on the following weekend I am setting off on an adventure...

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...

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...

Reading in Reykjavík

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