Bibliophile's reading report for July 2006

I'm now spending most of my free time reading the translation (see previous posts) with the original to discover translation errors and missed sentences. After than, I will make a third pass and correct the syntax and grammar to remove the translation 'flavour' and make it more Icelandic than it is at present. After all, this is my master's thesis and I want to get good grades and get published :-)

I still managed to do some pleasure reading:

Reviewed:
Lovely in her bones: Sharyn McCrumb
The Merchant's House: Kate Ellis
Murder on the Yellow Brick Road: Stuart Kaminsky
Payback: Fern Michaels
Sick of shadows: Sharyn McCrumb
These old shades: Georgette Heyer
Vetrarborgin: Arnaldur Indriðason

Unreviewed:
Djöflatertan: Þóra Sigurðardóttir & Marta María Jónasdóttir
Strangled prose: Joan Hess (review is already written, will post it some day)

Rereads: (unreviewed)
Hogfather: Terry Pratchett
Soul Music: Terry Pratchett
Thief of time: Terry Pratchett

I'm re-reading all the Discworld books, by sub-series. I have finished the Death/Susan books and am now reading the Witches sub-series. I just finished Wyrd Sisters.

Total books read: 12

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...

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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