Reading report for June 2012

If you have been wondering why there have been so few posts this month, it‘s because I have been reading: voraciously, almost manically. I finished 17 books in June, reading most of them from cover to cover within the month. Three of them were rereads, the In the Garden trilogy by the fabulous Nora Roberts, who is also my most read author of the month. 13 of the books were romances, with a 14th being romantic but lacking the clear-cut happy ending of the others. Of the rest, two were mysteries, one of them a short story collection and the other the first book in the series. Lastly I read one book on language history.

The best read of the month was Morgan Matson‘s Amy and Roger's Epic Detour, a romantic coming-of-age epistolary road novel for young adults. It reaches into picaresque territory, with the eponymous characters going on a road trip across the USA and taking a route not sanctioned by the adults who planned it for them, doing things they aren‘t supposed to do and making discoveries about themselves and others. The writing is fresh and it takes you to several interesting places around the USA, besides containing some cool music playlists that could be fun to recreate.

The discovery of the month was the Black Dagger Brotherhood urban fantasy series by J.R. Ward. They are so very addictive that I read four of them back to back, three in June and one in July. Once you get over how badly the first one, Dark Lover, is written, it‘s difficult to stop. The writing improves book by book, the world-building is fantastic and keeps getting more and more involved and detailed with each book, the romances are blazing hot and the fight scenes not as sketchy as they often are in romantic suspense/thrillers. I am trying to back away from reading all of them one after the other, as I would like to stretch out my reading of them.

News of the month is that I finally got a Kindle and discovered that I actually read faster on one than I do from a book, much as I do from a computer screen. As a result, the TBR challenge has suffered, with only 2 TBR books finished in June. Even if I had not got the Kindle, I think the TBR challenge would have suffered anyway, because I keep discovering more books my grandmother owned that I am unable to resist taking for my own, so the stack continues to swell. I am therefore changing tack and abandoning the idea of reducing the stack down to a fixed number and will instead aim to read at least 50 TBR books – newly added or old relics – from the stack in 2012. I have already finished 20 and there are six months left of the year, so it will be a realistic goal while still being a challenge.

The Books:

Rachel Gibson: Tangled Up in You. Romance, contemporary.
Molly Harper: How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf. Romance, contemporary, paranormal.
Michael Innes: Death at the President's Lodging.Mystery, police.
Michael Innes: Appleby Talking.Short mysteries, police.
John Bemelmans Marciano: Anonyponymous.Language history: people whose names have become words in English.
Morgan Matson: Amy and Roger's Epic Detour.Young adult novel.
Patricia Potter: Cassidy and the Princess. Romantic suspense.
Nora Roberts: Command Performance, The Playboy Prince. Romance, contemporary.From a series of 4.
Nora Roberts: Summer Desserts, Lessons Learned. Romance, contemporary. Paired novels.
Nora Roberts: Blue Dahlia, Black Rose, Red Lily. Romance, contemporary.Trilogy.
J.R. Ward: Dark Lover, Lover Awakened, Lover Revealed.Urban fantasy/paranormal romance, suspense. Books 1-3 in a series.

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...

Reading in Reykjavík

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