Top Ten Tuesdays: Top Ten Books I've Read So Far In 2013

Hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, Top Ten Tuesdays is a weekly meme where we post about top ten subjects relating to books. This time around it's "Top Ten Books I've Read So Far In 2013".

Here are mine, in no particular order:

A travelogue with a difference.
From the Author's Note: "This tale is the story of a real journey made in 1969 by a group of Indian villagers. For a short time I was able to travel with them. I travelled 15,000 kilometres in the third - class carriages of Indian Railways, over a period of seven months. ... To the villagers the journey was an adventure thrust upon them by unexpected fate when their kindly landowner died leaving her wealth in a trust fund for her villagers. Many of them found the confrontation with the world beyond their village alarming and unsettling. After their travels they returned to the years of crisis and war which resulted in the formation of Bangladesh and the tidal wave, famines and struggle which followed closely upon that war."

A satirical novel about science, magic and the relations between the sexes, it's funny, ugly and well worth reading. It's also loosely based on a real life person: a man who claimed to have discovered the clitoris (as a woman I find that quite funny, but of course it's about scientific discovery, not what generations of women already knew).

By turns funny, scary and sad, this is the memoir of a woman who grew up in east Africa during turbulent times. Not for the weak of heart.

A mixture of romance and military novel, this is the story of a couple who meet in Brussels and have a turbulent romance during the lead-up to the battle of Waterloo, but most of all it's about the battle itself and is still considered among the best descriptions of it.

Memoir of the childhood and teens of the famous cookbook author and actress, growing up in India in the years before during and just after World War II.

Travelogue of a retired British couple who bought a narrowboat and sailed it across the English Channel to France and along French and Belgian waterways to Carcasonne.

Roach investigates life after death in her inimitable way.

Definitive edition of Thomas' lovely poem/play about 24 hours in a small Welsh village.

Lovely, lovely children's book. I am considering starting a campaign to have it translated into Icelandic.

The latest from Nora Roberts and the best I have read by her in some time.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

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...

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...

Reading in Reykjavík

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