Reading report for August 2007

I finished 13 books in August, and added three new authors to my challenge (I am writing the last review). I managed to finish 4 books I had started some time ago and then stopped reading.

Reviewed:
Laura Childs: Shades of Earl Grey
Deborah Crombie: A Share in Death

Unreviewed:
Leslie Carroll: Miss Match
Lorrain D'Essen: Kangaroos in the Kitchen
Barry Paris: Audrey Hepburn
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Toy Village
Paul Theroux, ed.: The Best American Travel Writing 2001

Reviews coming up:
Ngaio Marsh: A Man lay dead, Enter a murderer, The Nursing Home Murder, Death in Ecstacy
Nancy Martin: How to Murder a Millionnaire (I'm reading the second book in this series and will review them together)

Comments

Anonymous said…

Glad to see the Harry Potter up there, I thought it was marvellous.
I'm interested to see what you make of the Ngiao Marshes, she was a favourite of mine. I used to own all her books but they have been given away somewhere along the moves in my life. Pity, as I don't think they are in print any more, and I'd rather like to read them all again.

September 10, 2007 8:20 pm

Anonymous said…

Fascinating. I too have a real love of mysteries. I have a penchant for the cozy variety, although I sometimes I should be - as a guy - be reading more hardboiled stuff.
I must confess I don't do as much reading as I used to and I give up too many books. I've just given up 'Clouds of Witness' by Dorothy Sayers after 60 pages or so. But I did finish Ian Rankin's latest!
Have you read any of Anthony Eglin's mysteries? They are very much in the English cozy mode, with a gardening theme. He's written three so far, starring retired botany professor Lawrence Kingston. Worth checking out.Best wishes.

September 13, 2007 7:17 am

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...

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...

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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