Book 6: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (reading notes and musings on Vonnegut's other books)

- My first introduction to the weird and wonderful world of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which I read as a teenager and can remember little about. Since Mr. Rosewater is mentioned in Slaughterhouse-Five, I really should go back and read it again, in English this time around.

- I have since read Welcome to the Money House, Deadeye Dick and Cat's Cradle, and have Hocus Pocus and The Sirens of Titan on my TBR list. Cat's Cradle is the one that affected me the most and is the best apocalyptic novel I have read.

-It was fun coming back to Vonnegut's sometimes biting humour and revisiting places (Ilium) and characters from other books (Eliot Rosewater, Kilgore Trout).

- The mixture of realism and fantasy in this novel makes for an interesting and sometimes shocking juxtaposition, as protagonist Billy Pilgrim slides between different eras of his life, from war-torn Germany near the end of World War II, to different parts of his marriage and life in Ilium, to his time as a zoo exhibit on the planet Tralfamadore.

- The concept of time in the book is scary and comforting at the same time - scary because it implies predestination and immutability, i.e. we have no control over our lives and even if we were unstuck in time like Billy Pilgrim, we would be powerless to do anything to change our futures; comforting because it implies a kind of immortality, at least for those who are unstuck in time like Pilgrim.

- Strangely, although the book doesn't really have an ending, at least not in the "everything is resolved" sense, it doesn't feel incomplete but instead it's like it gives us a satisfying glimpse into the life of the protagonist.

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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

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

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme

Reading in Reykjavík

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