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: