Reading Report, 20 February 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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I have only finished one book in the last week: Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch.
I began reading it weeks ago, but something interfered and I set it aside. Then I had a hankering after something funny and fantastical, and so I sat down and finished this humorous urban fantasy. There wasn't nearly as much mayhem and destruction as in the first book in the series, Rivers of London, but the author continues to develop characters from the previous book. The author left one part of the plot unresolved and it looks like it will continue on into the next book. I only hope this doesn't become an endless series in which the villain is always the same Moriarty-like mastermind.

I expect to finish Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron this week. I finally got to the point in the book where there was no going back, after having had a rough start of it, but since I have read several of Thubron's books before I knew I had to give myself some time to get into it. I do find his imagined conversations with a long-dead merchant traveller of the Silk Road slightly annoying, but those passages have fortunately not been too long.

I have also read one chapter of the King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany and am looking forward to continuing to read it. I had forgotten the beauty of Dunsany's prose (I read a number of his short stories many years ago) and am very much looking forward to immersing myself in this story once I finish Thubron's travelogue.

My newest slow read, 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, is proving to be a disappointment. I am only on the first chapter and am finding the tone almost intolerably snobbish and the majority of the places I have read about so far have been hotels or restaurants of the "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it" type (and a version of that phrase has actually been used once already in writing about one of the recommended restaurants). I almost feel as if I have strayed back into the days when travel for leisure was only for the rich and the guidebooks were written for people with plenty of money. This is really a pity, because the book is well organised and full of useful information, e.g. opening hours and seasonal closings, addresses, phone numbers and so on.

In other news: My oldest and best friend got married last weekend, so I got to attend a lovely, intimate wedding.This was the culmination of 16 years of cohabiting and the couple's two children were happy and just a bit bewildered by it all. I didn't have a lot of time to make them them a wedding present, because they only announced with a week's notice, but I gave them a small quilt that I made many years ago, with a Sunbonnet Sue and Overall Bill theme that was suitable for the occasion:

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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