Reading report, 9. January 2017

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The reading year began well for me. I have finished three books so far, which is considerably fewer than the same time last year, but they were good books.

First came Thee Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story by Leonie Swann.

I found the idea of the story intriguing: a herd of sheep, a mixed bag of an old Irish heritage breed and some other breeds, some of them rescue animals, find their beloved shepherd dead in their pasture, a spade lodged in his abdomen. The humans around them don't seem too concerned or eager to investigate, so the sheep decide to solve the mystery themselves.

There is a sequel, about what happens to the sheep after the case is solved.

Then came Maigret and the Wine Merchant by Georges Simenon.

One of the things I love about Simenon's crime novels is that they are usually not all about finding out whodunit, but rather about proving that a particular person did it and finding out why. There is sometimes some uncertainty about the killer's identity, but it is usually cleared up around midway through the story, and the rest is a psychological chess game with the killer on one side and Maigret and his team on the other.

In this case, a rich wine merchant is murdered and no-one seems to care overmuch. Maigret's investigation reveals a man obsessed with being the boss, with an apparently insatiable appetite for sex that's driven by a need to dominate. A lot of people might have wished him dead, but who had the nerve?

The final book was All Fishermen Are Liars by Linda Greenlaw.

I first found out about Linda Greenlaw when I found her first book, The Hungy Ocean, at a book sale and bought it on a whim. I grew up in a fishing village in northern Iceland and heard and read a lot of sea stories. It was therefore interesting to read a sea story from another fishing culture.

This book is a collection of sometimes funny, often hair-raising sea stories, possibly true, possibly not, probably somewhere halfway in-between, framed by the story of the author and her concerns for the health of a good friend and her attempts to persuade him to go into retirement. I have another one of her books on my TBR shelf and will read it soon - if I can find it.

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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