Reading report for August 2009, and changes to the TBR challenge

I finished 20 books in August:

1 perennial re-read:

Gerald Durrell: Catch Me a Colobus - memoir, animal collecting

5 books in the Top Mysteries challenge, one of them part of a trilogy that’s listed as one book in the CWA list, so you could say I have read 4 1/3 TM titles. They are:

E.C. Bentley: Trent's Last Case - Murder mystery
Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands - Espionage thriller
Len Deighton: Berlin Game - Espionage thriller (to be reviewed with the rest of the trilogy)
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird - Novel
Dorothy L. Sayers: Gaudy Night - Murder mystery

5 in the Icelandic books challenge: 2 so-so short story collections, 2 pretty good poetry books, and one travelogue that pretty much sucked due to being mostly a rewrite of the historical and descriptive chapters of some guide book, interspersed with only a handful of observations by the author herself. They are:

Andrés G. Þormar : Hillingar - short stories
Eggert Ólafsson : Kvæði (Íslensk úrvalsrit) -poetry
Helgi Valtýsson : Þegar Kóngsbænadagurinn týndist og aðrar sögur - short stories
Jón Þorláksson : Ljóðmæli (Íslensk úrvalsrit) - poetry and poetry translations
Rannveig Tómasdóttir : Fjarlæg lönd og framandi þjóðir - travelogue

2 books from the TBR list:

Anthony Bourdain: Gone Bamboo - Mafia thriller
Sharyn Mccrumb: Ghost Riders - Historical novel

Unfortunately I must admit that I have failed to keep to the TBR challenge list. The sin registry numbers a whole 8 books that I read because I wanted to read them more than I wanted to read any book on the challenge list, although at least 4 of them actually fit the challenge criteria. The books were:

Andrea Camilleri: The Terracotta Dog - Murder mystery
Polly Evans: Kiwis Might Fly - Travelogue
Ngaio Marsh: Off With His Head and Scales of Justice - Murder mysteries
Nora Roberts: Midnight Bayou and Northern Lights - Romantic thrillers
Dorothy L. Sayers: Have His Carcase - Murder mystery
(No. 8 was the reread).

The TBR-for-over-a-year challenge:
I am beginning to feel that having such a long master list is becoming a chore. Since reading is supposed to be fun, I have decided to change the TBR challenge, make it more spontaneous and allow myself to read books I am in the mood for reading that don’t belong in the challenge. I am now going to run the challenge on a monthly basis, at least to the end of the year. At the beginning of each month, I will pre-choose 5 books that fit the original criteria (I have owned them for more than a year but not read them yet), to read during that month. When I have finished reading those 5 books, I will be free to read all the non-challenge books I want, to the end of the month when the cycle begins again. Any books I read that fit the criteria but aren't on the list count towards the final tally. I am beginning with the 4 books on the original list I am most interested in reading right now (indeed, I have started reading one of them already), and adding 1 new one I am in the mood for reading.

The Books:
Heaven’s Command by James Morris
La Cucina by Lily Prior
Onions in the Stew by Betty MacDonald
Portrait in Death by J.D. Robb
The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

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...

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...

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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