Skip to main content

Reading report for March 2012

I though it was about time I posted something. I have several partially written posts on the go but haven‘t had time to finish any of them, and probably will not be able to until the second week in May. This post is purely due to a sudden lack of inspiration (hopefully only temporarily) leaving me unable to write anything of sense in the final assignment I am in the middle of.

Despite loads of school work I did have some time to read in March. However, I am having one of my periodic reading crises, meaning I am rereading more than usual, in this case 4 out of 10 books finished during the month.

The Books:
  • M.C. Beaton: Death of a Gossip and Death of a Cad. Murder mysteries, the first two in the Hamish Macbeth series. I have started reading this series from the beginning.
  • Erma Bombeck: I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression. Humour. Reread. Erma is always funny, but some of her jokes are admittedly getting dated.
  • Torrey Chanslor: Our First Murder. Mystery. Two elderly sisters and their middle-aged cousin move to New York to take over a detective agency and quickly get hired to solve a murder.
  • Jennifer Crusie: The Cinderella Deal and Anyone But You. Romances. Rereads.
  • Georgette Heyer: The Foundling. Historical romance. This book has not one but two of the stock characters I have come to dread coming across in Heyer's books: the Callow Schoolboy and the Ingénue. Both are totally over the top and the girl doesn't have the brains of a guppy. I think I must have got lucky with Heyer and read all of her best (by which I mean mostly free of Callow Schoolboys and Ingénues) books first and am now scraping the bottom of the barrel.
  • Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner : Freakonomics . Economics for non-economists.
  • Terry Pratchett: Carpe Jugulum. Fantasy. Reread. This is a good palate cleanser if you have had enough of the sparkly kind of vampire, or even the True Blood kind.
  • Helen Zahavi: Dirty Weekend. Psychological thriller. I saw the movie ages ago. It - as much as I can remember of it - follows the original quite closely on the surface, except I don‘t remember getting any real sense from the movie of the gnawing, gut-wrenching fear that drives Bella, the anti-heroine of the book, to act as she does.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more