Skip to main content

Reading report for February 2008

I decided to include the genre and my star ratings with the books this time. Some reviews will follow later in the month.

As you can see, I am below average in my reading this month. It is not surprising, since an annoyed customer managed to put a damper on my reading activities. I got the big translation project I have mentioned before through a translation centre that I do freelance work for and my middleman misunderstood the client’s deadline requirements, telling me I had 10 days longer than I really did. My plan had been to finish 3-4 days ahead of the deadline I thought I had, but an emergency call from the middleman changed all that and instead of finishing at a leisurely pace, I had a couple of long days of proofreading the translation at double my usual pace, resulting in a myalgia-related headache that lasted a week and two physiotherapy sessions. But I did it and now I have free time to read again.

Jennifer Crusie: Charlie All Night (contemporary romance): 3+ stars
Susan Donovan: He loves Lucy (contemporary romance): 2+ stars
Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford (classic novel): 3 stars (reviewed)
Shannon Hale: Princess Academy (YA fantasy): 4+ stars (working on a review)
Cynthia Heimel: If you can't live without me, why aren't you dead yet? (essay collection): 3+ stars (may review)
Matthew Parris: Inca-Cola: A traveller's tale of Peru (travel): 3+ stars
Diane Setterfield: The Thirteenth Tale (novel): 4+ stars (working on a review)
Alan Taylor, ed.: Long Overdue (writings about libraries): 3+ stars

Reread:
JRR Tolkien: The Fellowship of the Ring (fantasy): 5+ stars

Upcoming reads:
I’m thinking about making Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle my classic for March, and I have Jonathan Strange and Mr. Morrell calling out to me from the TBR pile. It's hard to judge whether it's going to be a slow read or a fast one (not counted in pages per hour but number of reading sessions).
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more