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.

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

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

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 and

Reading in Reykjavík

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