December 2006 reading report

Happy New Year!

I did not finish reading many books in December, but the number of pages does not reflect this – most of the the books I read were over 300 pages long. I have turned back to an old hobby I all but abandoned while I was at university, namely rock painting, and anyone who has done any painting knows that it's impossible to paint well while holding a book ;-)

I listened to an unabridged audiobook of The Lord of the Rings while I painted, so I suppose if I count the pages of that book into the total, it makes a pretty good number of pages. In addition, I read about half of the 600-something pages of The Historian, which will probably be the fist book I finish reading in 2007.

I finished three of the remaining four books in the From the Stacks challenge.

Books I plan to review: (this may change)

The Road to Oxiana: Robert Byron
My journey to Lhasa: Alexandra David-Neel (fourth From the Stacks challenge book finished)
The Emperor's Babe: Bernardine Evaristo (second From the Stacks challenge book finished)
Conspiracy in Death: JD Robb (third From the Stacks challenge book finished)

Unreviewed (as always, you can request a review if you want to know what I thought of them)
The Big book of cats: Susan Feuer, ed.
The Last Continent: Terry Pratchett
Madame Sarah: Cornelia Otis Skinner

Audio book listened to:
The Lord of the Rings trilogy, read by Rob Inglis: JRR Tolkien

Comments

Karen (Euro Crime) said…

I'd love to hear your views on The Last Continent. I haven't read much Pratchett for a long time but I did enjoy that one very much at the time.

January 01, 2007 8:41 pm

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

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How to make a simple origami bookmark

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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...

Reading in Reykjavík

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