Reading report for July 2012

I finished 14 books and 2 novellas in July, all but one of which I started reading within the month, so the page count is impressive, around 5400 pages, not counting those parts of London: The Biography I read earlier. You could say I‘m making up for lost time, having read very little (for me) during the winter.

Of the books I read in July, I have already reviewed London: The Biography . Not unsurprisingly, 3 of the other books and one novella came from the Black Dagger Brotherthood series. The other novella takes place in the same world but is not part of the series. Neither novella will go on the Books Read list until I have finished the books they are to be found in, but the titles are Father Mine and The Story of Son. The former is about the couple from Lover Awakened , the third book in the series, and what happened afterwards. The other is a sweet paranormal love story.

Another series I recently discovered Debbie Macomber‘s Cedar Cove books, of which I read the two first in July. They weren‘t as endearing as her Christmas stories, but gave one a nice and cosy, warm feeling, much like the Cat Who books by Lilian Jackson Braun, only without the murders. Although the main theme in these books is love, they are not traditional one man/one woman romances but rather parts of a larger, multi-book story with multiple characters, with one or two love stories being brought to the I do in each book and new ones continued or started.

A third series I have just started reading is the Inspector Lynley mysteries. I was familiar with Lynley and his sidekick Havers from the TV series so I found it rather funny to read the description of Lynley in the book. I have him firmly fixed in my mind as looking like the delicious Nathaniel Parker, the actor who portrays him in the TV series, who is definitely not blond like the Lynley of the books. I have started reading the second book and so far TV Lynley seems to be winning – I still see Parker in my mind whenever I read the name.

I also discovered the Uncle John‘s Bathroom Readers when I came across one in a second hand shop last month. I will definitely be buying more of them.

As for the rest, I read 2 romance novels and a collection of 5 romance novellas, one Ellis Peters mystery, and reread two books, one by Terry Pratchett and one by Piers Anthony. I discovered Anthony‘s Xanth books long ago and enjoyed them up to around book 20 when I decided I‘d had my fill of them. However, I never got rid of my copies, and recently I decided to reread them to help me to decide whether or not I want to keep them.

The Books:
Peter Ackroyd: London: The Biography. History.
Piers Anthony: A Spell for Chameleon. Fantasy. Reread.
Bathroom Reader's Institute: Uncle John's Bathroom Reader: Wonderful World of Odd. Trivia.
Elizabeth George: A Great Deliverance. Police procedural. Murder mystery.
Robin Kaye: Too Hot to Handle. Contemporary romance.
Debbie Macomber: 16 Lighthouse Road and 204 Rosewood Lane. Women‘s literature.
Cathy Maxwell; Elaine Fox; Jeaniene Frost; Sophia Nash; Tracy Anne Warren: Four Dukes and a Devil. Romance, mixture of historical, contemporary and paranormal.
Ellis Peters: Death and the Joyful Woman. Murder mystery.
Terry Pratchett: Reaper Man. Fantasy. Reread.
Nora Roberts: Sacred Sins. Romantic suspense.
J.R. Ward: Lover Unbound , Lover Enshrined and Lover Avenged. Urban fantasy/Paranormal romance.

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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