Reading report, February 13, 2017

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I didn't read much last week - didn't feel like making a push to finish any of the books I have been reading - but did finish one I have been steadily reading over the last couple of years:

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. This monster of a book is more than 900 pages long and I have been reading it bit by bit in the loo. It's funny (or perhaps not) that when I started it I was going "I've read that!" almost every time I turned a page, but after the 1920s these silent exclamations got fewer and fewer as I got closer to my own time, and I had only read a handful of the books published after 1990, although I own copies of several more that I plan to read when that mythical "one day" rolls around.

Much as I detest books and articles telling me I must do something, I found it interesting to see what books were chosen for inclusion in this volume. The edition I have is the original 2006 one, but I know the list has been changed in subsequent editions.

I figured it might be interesting to see how many of these books I have read, but I haven't been able to find the original 2006 list online and I am certainly not going to type it all up myself, so it will have to wait.

Its replacement in the loo is 1000 Places to See Before You Die. I expect that one will take at least a year to finish. I hope I may find some places in it that I deem worthy of visiting, but I am no more going to start chasing those places than I am going to read all the books in 1001 Books....

I have started reading Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron and expect to finish that in rather less time than 1000 Places.... I am having slight doubts about whether or not to continue reading it (Thubron can be a bit hard to get into, as I experienced when I read one of his previous books), but I am planning to give it the 50-page treatment before deciding.

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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