Reading Report for January 2012

I read 14 books in January, in a number of genres. Out of those 14, six were e-books and five were books I had started reading before the beginning of the month. I have at least 20 more books I started reading at some point and then either decided to save for later or forgot about, and now I want to try to finish some of them.

Among the books I started and finished within the month was the first book I have read in its entirety on a mobile device. I decided to review that experience and will discuss the device, the software and the overall reading experience in a review within a few days.

The books were divided between fiction and non-fiction as follows:

Of the 6 fiction volumes, two were myth-based fantasies, one was a science fiction novella, one a romance, one a mystery-suspense novel and one a collection of cartoons.

Of the 8 non-fiction volumes, three were about fashion, two were biographies, two history books and one was about the natural sciences.

As I mentioned in my last post I have stopped, for the time being, writing detailed reviews, but I have included a bit of information about the January books in the list below.

The Books:

Shoichi Aoki: Fruits. Fashion photography. Fabulous and wacky photographs of Japanese youngsters showing off their creativity and colourful fashion sense. Originally from a Japanese fashion magazine.
Jaycee Dugard: A Stolen Life. Autobiography/Memoir. Fascinating and sad. It‘s not particularly well written, but it doesn't have to be, not with this kind of story. Dugard gives a clear-headed account of her 18-year captivity and an insight into the mentality of a survivor.
Noël Riley Fitch: Appetite for Life: The biography of Julia Child. Child‘s life was fascinating, especially her years in Asia during World War II and her life in France and the work on her first cookbook, but the whole book gives a detailed (sometimes too much so) account of her life and character.
Richard Fortey: Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. Popular science. Very interesting, informative and gossipy tour of several departments of London‘s Natural History Museum, by a long-time employee.
Hadley Freeman: The Meaning of Sunglasses, and a guide to almost all things fashionable. Fashion advice, opinion and anecdotes. Freeman is a journalist who writes a fashion advice column for The Guardian. Not afraid of calling a spade a shovel, she takes the reader on an often funny tour of fashion do's and dont's. I didn't agree with all of her advice, but I found it very entertaining.
Neil Gaiman: Odd and the Frost Giants. Fantasy for young readers. This playful book for children about a young boy who helps Odin, Thor and Loki regain control of Asgard will entertain not only kids but also adults who know and enjoy the Norse myths.
Michael Innes: The Daffodil Affair. Suspense mystery. Weird and surreal as usual, this time Inspector Appleby is on the trail of a counting horse, a girl with multiple personalities, a haunted house and a man with a strange and evil plan. All right in the middle of World War II.
Paola Jacobbi: I want those shoes. Fashion advice and opinions. Insubstantial and entertaining, Jacobbi discusses different kinds of shoes and why we love them.
Robin Kaye: Romeo, Romeo. Contemporary romance. A sexy story of two people who just wanted a commitment-free fuck-buddy relationship, but got much more than they bargained for.
Lea Korsgaard & Stéphanie Surugue : Bókaránið mikla - Saga af ótrúlegum glæp (The Great Book Theft. Translated from Danish: Det Store Bogtyveri). True crime. Incredible and detailed account of one of the largest library book thefts in history.
Jan Morris, ed.: The Oxford Book of Oxford. The history of Oxford University in the words of its students, teachers and visitors. Fantastic and informative collection of epigrams, epitaphs, quotations and passages from letters, essays, poems, novels and autobiographies.
Rick Riordan: The Lightning Thief. Young adult fantasy based on the Greek myths. Action-filled adventure, full of characters from and allusions to Greek mythology, but with a modern twist.
Ronald Searle: The Terror of St. Trinian's. Humour, cartoons. Funny classic cartoons about the wicked students of St. Trinian‘s School for Girls.
Connie Willis: All seated on the ground. Christmas sci-fi novella with a romantic flair. A funny and heart-warming story about first contact between humans and extraterrestrials.

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

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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