January and February book haul, part 1

It would be easy to think, based on the lack of "look at the books I bought!" posts here lately, that I have finally been able to curb my book-buying mania, but no - I have just been too lazy to photograph my acquisitions.

Here are the books I have bought since the last time I posted a Book Haul report:

All books were bought second hand.

Here we have a mixed bag: A travel book, a biography, a light-hearted popular sociology book, a memoir, a steampunk fantasy and three books about philosophy.

Comments:

The Weekenders and Jane Austen belong to two genres that have always been favourites of mine: travel and biography.
Very British Problems should be an interesting follow-up to the anthropology book I am currently reading,Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox.
My Family and Other Animals is a perennial favourite of mine, and it was nice to be able to get a fresh copy of it, since my old trade paperback edition is falling apart.
Boneshaker: I like reading science fiction (if it isn't too heavy on the science), and have been wanting to delve into the steampunk sub-genre for some time.
The philosophy books: As a liberal arts major I had to take an introduction to philosophy course at university that I ended up doing twice because of clashing exam schedules during my first semester and changes in the course material between years. The course consisted mostly of telling us about the ancient philosophers and the basic ideas of their philosophy, and while I easily passed the exam, I was never particularly interested in the subject. Lately, however, I have started becoming interested in it and finding several books about the subject, I chose the three most likely volumes and intend to read them when my mind again turns towards such matters.

Comments

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...

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...

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 ...

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