Wednesday reading experience #36

Read a bibliobook.

A bibliobook is a book that is about or prominently features books and/or book people, and can include both fiction and non fiction. Bibliobooks are perhaps the best proof of the enduring love people have for books and reading.

Some suggestions:
Non-fiction:

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. Memoir about her long-lasting intercontinental relationship with a book shop and its staff. There is a charming movie starring Anne Bancroft as Hanff.
At Home with Books by Estelle Ellis & Caroline Seebohm, photographs by Christopher Simon Sykes. Here’s an excerpt from my review of it: “…a gorgeous, big book with oodles of pictures and chapters on various millionaires, aristocrats, collectors and designers and their libraries, interspersed with advice on how to care for and display books. The libraries range from small and cosy to huge and imposing, but all the owners are real bibliophiles who read their books and obviously love them. ... Cool coffee table book.”
Living with Books by Alan Powers. Another gorgeous coffee-table book about libraries, public and private.
Ex Libris: Confessions of a common reader by Anne Fadiman. A collection of essays about books and reading.
Used and Rare: Travels in the book world by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. About how they became book collectors. Warning: contains a proliferation of proofing errors.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (American title: The professor and the Madman) by Simon Winchester.
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas A. Basbanes. A collection of anecdotes and essays about various aspects of books.
Book Lust and More Book Lust by Nancy Pearl. Reading recommendations galore.
A Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Love and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for, and Appreciating Books, edited by Rob Kaplan. What the title says.

I am slowly working my way through The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom, but will only recommend it to very patient readers.

Fiction:

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. A fantastic literary bibliomystery.
The Eyre Affair and its sequels, by Jasper Fforde. Entertaining fantasy/alt-reality bibliothrillers.
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. A gothic thriller featuring a writer and her biographer.
Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley. The first is a story about a woman who buys a travelling bookshop and the second is a spy mystery centered on a bookshop.
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. The story is told in the first person by a young woman who is trying to write a book describing the place where she lives and its inhabitants.
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. Fantasy about a boy who reads himself into a book.
The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. A historical mystery about murders copying scenes from Dante’s Inferno.
Death on Demand by Carolyn G. Hart. A murder mystery centering on a bookshop. All of the books in the series that follows contain allusions to mysteries and authors and frequent mentions of both.
Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb. Both are about a writer. The first takes place at a fantasy/sci-fi convention, the second centers on a buried manuscript.
The Club Dumas Arturo Pérez-Reverte. About an unscrupulous rare-book dealer on the trail of a book of magic.

On my TBR list I have:

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
The Book Thief Markus Zusak.
So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading by Sara Nelson.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer.
The Yellow Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee.
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke.
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.
The Booklover mysteries by Julie Kaewert. I have three of them lined up, but want to find the first before I start.

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...

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