Skip to main content

Bibliophile’s reading report for April 2006

In spite of having loads of school work (did I mention that I’m about to finish my graduate studies?) I still managed to read 18 books in April. They would have been much fewer if it had not been for Easter. It’s amazing what a determined person can do over several days uninterrupted by work or classes, so I managed to finish an amazing amount of school work and read a book or two per day besides.

Reviewed:
The Barbie Chronicles: a living doll turns forty: Yona Zeldis McDonough (social history)
The Case is Closed: Patricia Wentworth (murder mystery)
Every boy's got one: Meg Cabot (romance)
Grey Mask: Patricia Wentworth (mystery)
Latter End: Patricia Wentworth (murder mystery)
Maigret has scruples: Georges Simenon (murder mystery)
Maigret in exile: Georges Simenon (murder mystery)
The Murdered House: Pierre Magnan (murder mystery)

Unreviewed:
Belle of the Ball: Pam McCutcheon (historical romance)
The Daughter of Time: Josephine Tey (murder mystery, historical)
Desert divers: Sven Lindqvist (travel, biography)
Gulliver's Travels: Jonathan Swift (satire)
In search of Genghis Khan: Tim Severin (travel)
Jonathan Swift: a portrait: Victoria Glendinning (biography
The Loves of Lord Granton: Marion Chesney (historical romance)
Mali blues: Traveling to an African beat: Lieve Joris (travel)
Thud!: Terry Pratchett (fantasy)
When lightning strikes: Jenny Carroll (teen lit. supernatural adventure)

I am saving up some reviews to post in June to keep the blog going while I slave away at the first draft of my master's thesis. Look for reviews of some of these books then.

Comments

Maxine Clarke said…
Looking forward to reading what you make of the Daughter of Time; was a big favourite of mine once, and as a result I read anything I could get my hands on about Richard III.
Hope the thesis goes well.

Apologies by the way for commenting about Keris Stainton' reading challenge in my last comment: I completely missed the fact that you'd already listed her in your fellow-reading challengers posting -- felt a bit of an idiot once I'd realised that, which was before my comment went live, so I could not "recall" it.

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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...