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:

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...

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 ...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

Reading in Reykjavík

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