Meme: Top Ten Books I Hope Santa brings

Top Ten Tuesdays is a meme organised by The Broke and the Bookish. Visit them and click on the links to visit some of the other participating blogs to see more Christmas wish lists.

To compile this list I took a look at my Book Depository and BookMooch wish lists and decided which books I would like to most to get for Christmas. These are mostly wishlist books I can’t get from the library and am unlikely to get through BookMooch, plus a couple of new or newish books I can’t wait to read. There are no Icelandic books on the list, but I am looking forward to reading the latest books by Arnaldur Indriðason (which my parents will in all likelihood get for Xmas) and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (which one of my friends will buy for herself if she doesn’t get it for Xmas), and several other Icelandic authors not known in other countries.

1. The Songs of Love and Death anthology. This has stories by several of my favourite authors.
2. The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais. Foodie read - I love those.
3. Just Kids by Patti Smith. I have been wanting to read this since I first heard of it. Patti Smith rocks!
4. August Heat by Andrea Camilleri. I am following this series.
5. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan.
6. The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby.
7. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson. Loved the movie, would love to read the book.
8. Vol. 1 of the Questionable Content comic book by Jeph Jacques. My favourite web comic.
9. Knife Skills Illustrated: A User's Manual by Peter Hertzmann. One for the kitchen.
10. Any Culinaria book I don’t have, especially the ones on Italy, Spain, France and China. These are gorgeous coffee-table books full of photos, recipes and information.

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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