Reading in Reykjavík

I suddenly realised I forgot to write a wrap-up post for this challenge. Well, here it is: I finished the first book in the What's in a Name challenge on August 30, and the final one on October 1, so it took me a little over a month to read them all. The books were: a topographical feature (land formation): The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger. something you'd see in the sky: The Raven in the Foregate , by Ellis Peters a creepy crawly: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating , by Elizabeth Tova Bailey a type of house: Daughters of the House by Michèle Roberts something you'd carry in your pocket, purse, or backpack: The Motorcycle Diaries , by Ernesto 'Che' Guevara something you'd find on a calendar: The Darling Buds of May , by H.E. Bates As you can see, the books were quite the mixed bag, half fiction and half non-fiction: some travel, some historical crime, some memoirs mixed with natural history, literary fiction, humorous fiction and some m...

I finished 21 books in several genres in October, of which 9 were TBR challenge books and 4 were rereads. After catching up with the Brotherhood of the Black Dagger series, I found I wanted to sink myself into another made-up world and started reading a new series: the Cynster family historical romance novels by Stephanie Laurens. I finished four of them in October and am now reading the fifth. I am finding these historicals an interesting, well-written and well-plotted collection of well-known romance themes with kick-ass heroines and pretty much interchangeable heroes. So far the storylines have been the ‘compromised lady’ combined with ‘the heir must die’, the ‘gentleman problem solver’ combined with the ‘sneak thief’, the ‘surprising will’ combined with the ‘forced marriage’ and ‘the woman who must keep her land and protect her people at all cost’, and another ‘gentleman problem solver’, this time combined with ‘amorous amateur criminal investigators’ and, briefly, the ‘woman d...