Reading report for February 2009

I finished 21 books in February, which is quite a bit better than my monthly average for 2008 (not that I'm competing with myself or anything...). Out of those, I had started reading 5 before the beginning of the month – 2 of them last summer.

In the reading challenges the situation is as follows:

I finished the last of the Mystery Reader Café challenge books: the book with the word "murder" in the title, so that challenge is finished.
In the 52 Icelandic books challenge I read 4 books.
In the Top Mysteries challenge I finished 2 books.
In the TBR challenge I finished 7 books that had been on my shelves for more than a year.

Additionally, I culled 7 of the books I read this month and will be adding them to my BookMooch inventory, making room on my book shelves for the 7 mooched books I received in the mail. 5 of these I will be reading for the Top Mysteries challenge. I also found 2 TM challenge books in the book section of a local charity shop.

I listened to one audio book in February, or rather a filmed reading: Neil Gaiman was generous enough to offer live audiovisual recordings of his reading of The Graveyard Book through his blog. The recordings were made when he was on the promotional tour for the book. (If you follow the link, scroll to the bottom to start listening (and watching) in the correct order).

The books I read or listened to in February: (I have posted reviews of those marked with *)

*Arnaldur Indriðason : Myrká (police procedural)
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: The Physiology of Taste (kitchen science and philosophy)
Mary Higgins Clark: The Lottery Winner (detective stories)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: The Mistress of Spices (novel, romance)
Neil Gaiman: The Graveyard Book and Coraline (children's fantasy/horror)
John Grogan: Marley and Me (memoir)
*Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon (noir detective story)
Tony Hillerman: The Dark Wind (police procedural, thriller)
Ingólfur Jónsson (collected by) : Þjóðlegar sagnir og ævintýri (folk and fairy tales)
Jón R Hjálmarsson : Þjóðsögur við þjóðveginn (folk tales)
H.R.F. Keating: Death of a Fat God (mystery)
India Knight, editor: The Dirty Bits - for Girls (anthology, erotica)
Sharyn McCrumb: Paying the Piper (mystery)
*Steven Saylor: A Murder on the Appian Way (mystery)
*Fred Vargas: Have Mercy on Us All (police procedural)
*Fred Vargas: Seeking Whom He May Devour (police procedural)
Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson : Flateyjargáta (mystery)
*Hillary Waugh: Last Seen Wearing (police procedural)
Jeanette Winterson: Boating for Beginners (fantasy, satire)

Reread:
Gerald Durrell: The Whispering Land (travel, animals)

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...

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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