Skip to main content

Reading report for April 2009

I read 16 books in April, which is slightly fewer books than the average of the three preceding months. Of these, I had started five in an earlier month and one in the previous year, and 5 were under 150 pages, so in pages I read much less than in March. Asterisked books have been or will be reviewed on this blog.

The challenges:
  • Top mysteries: 4. These were the only crime books I read in April.
  • Icelandic books: 3. Should have been 4, but I was one book ahead so I am still on track.
  • TBR for more than a year: 4, which is disappointing but not unexpected, as I found a lot of interesting library books that I wanted to read.

The books:
Michael Bell, ed.: Scouts in Bondage and other violations of literary propriety (collection of unintentionally humorous book titles)
André Bernard: Now all we need is a Title (famous books and their original planned titles)
T.J.Binyon: Murder Will Out (overview of the history of the detective in crime fiction)
*Nicholas Blake: The Beast Must Die (murder mystery)
*Christianna Brand: Green for Danger (murder mystery)
Bill Bryson (issue editor) & Jason Wilson (series editor) : The Best American Travel Writing 2000 (travel writing)
*Bill Buford: Heat (foodoir (see Note))
*Lionel Davidson: The Sun Chemist (thriller)
*Fjodor Dostojevski: Crime and Punishment (novel, psychological thriller)
Halldór Kiljan Laxness: Kristnihald undir Jökli (English title: Christianity at Glacier, Under the Glacier) (novel, magic realism)
Huldar Breiðfjörð: Múrinn í Kína (title meaning in English: The Wall in China) (travelogue)
*William Least Heat Moon: Blue Highways (travelogue)
Alan Moore (story) & Dave Gibbons (illustration): Watchmen (graphic novel)
Pratchett, Stewart & Cohen: The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (popular science combined with fantasy)
Snjólaug Bragadóttir frá Skáldalæk: Allir eru ógiftir í verinu (romance)
Jan Werner: Angels from Hell (humour)
--

Note: foodoir = portmanteau of food + memoir. Although I came up with it all by myself, I discovered I wasn’t, to my disappointment, the first to coin it. When applied to food photography, it is a portmanteau of food + boudoir and refers to images that can also be labelled as food porn.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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...
9 comments
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