Skip to main content

This week's book haul

I hit on a sale at one of the charity shops I occasionally visit - any 10 books for a fixed price - and since there were some books there I wanted and buying 5 of them full price would cost more than getting 10 on sale, I went browsing and found five more I wanted. I got one more from the free books basket, and another two from another charity shop, a total of 13. In the background is the biggest of my TBR bookcases:


What I got was:
A French book of portraits of farm animals and their owners. Have I mentioned that I love photography books? If I haven't, well: now you know;
A sampler of English poetry through the ages (I have the big Norton Anthology of English Literature, but this is something I can read in bed without breaking my nose if I fall asleep reading it);
A Nancy Mitford novel - I have had her books recommended to me by several people and this one especially;
Les Misérables, which I actually also have as an ebook, but this is a newer translation. One day I hope to read it in French, but until then the English translation will have to do;
Maurice I have wanted to read for some time and the same goes for The Handmaid's Tale;
Eco's Theory of Semantics is related to my field of work and I like his non-fiction better than his novels;
The Medici book looked interesting, as did the red book with the Icelandic title, the English title of which is  Sex in History.
The cookbook is one of the old Time-Life Foods of the World books, and the recipe booklet is missing, but the book will make an interesting read. 
Finally, I bought yet another art book. I have a number of them but have never given myself the time to study any but the rock painting ones. I will probably wait until I retire and then take up sketching and painting on canvas as a hobby.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme