Skip to main content

Reading report for March 2011

I read 16 books in March, several of which I started reading in a previous month. 6 were TBR challenge books, one a Top Mysteries challenge read, 2 were Gothic Challenge reads, and one a Buchmesse read.

One was an audio-book, Unseen Academicals, which was also a re-read, if you can call listening to audio-books "reading". I suppose you could call it "absorbing", because it is actually more than just listening.  Shortly before I listened to it I had read The Rules of Association Football 1863, a tiny little book that contains a short overview of the history of football and the original rules of the modern game, which  enhanced my enjoyment of Unseen Academicals because quite a lot of that book is taken up by a football game, although it isn‘t, per se, about football.

It looks as if April is going to be another month of finishing up books I started in a previous month, because in the last week I have started reading something like 9 books, and lost interest in all of them once I took a break. I occasionally go through such attention-span problems, but it never lasts very long. Until this one ends I am focusing on short stories so I will at least finish something in each reading session.

The Books:
  • The Rules of Association Football 1863.
  • Louisa May Alcott: Little Women or, Margaret, Jo, Elizabeth and Amy. First time I read this classic from beginning to end in an unabbreviated version. Lovely writing and good storytelling, but a bit too moralistic and preachy for my taste.
  • M.C. Beaton: Death of a Nag. Murder mystery.
  • Bragi Ólafsson: Sendiherrann, ljóð í óbundnu máli (The Ambassador). Literary novel. A disappointment.
  • Daniel Defoe: The King of Pirates. Epistolatory novel that glamorises piracy.
  • Agnès Desarthe: Good Intentions. Literary novel.
  • Neil Gaiman: M is for Magic. Short stories for kids and young adults.
  • Katie MacAlister: Sex and the Single Vampire.Urban fantasy.
  • Léo Malet: 120 Rue de la Gare. Noir murder mystery.
  • Ngaio Marsh: Black as He's Painted. Murder mystery.
  • Ngaio Marsh: Last Ditch. Murder mystery, police procedural.
  • Terry Pratchett: Unseen Academicals.Fantasy.
  • Sanders, Girling, Davies, Sanders: Would You Believe It? Useless information you can't afford to be without. Book of trivia, much of which is out of date, when it isn't plain wrong.
  • Edgar Wallace: The Four Just Men.Thriller.
  • Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto.Gothic novel.
  • Sarah Wendell & Candy Tan : Beyond Heaving bosoms: The Smart Bitches‘ Guide to Romance. Literary handbook.
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

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...
25 comments
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