Reading in Reykjavík

I read only 10 books in February. One was non-fiction and two were what I like to call half-fiction . The rest were fiction, one murder mystery and six M/M romances. The two half-fictions were collections of short narratives. One was a cute little book of anecdotes about famous and once-famous musicians, composers and conductors. I picked it up years ago in a junk shop in Denmark and only got around to reading recently. The other was the sometimes funny and always amusing Sleeping at the Starlite Motel , a perfect example of the storyteller’s craft. I call them half-fiction because anecdotes are often completely made-up and even when they are true they are more often than not impossible to corroborate, even if they are based on real people and ring true, while some may be true but have had the not-famous people they happened to replaced by famous ones because it makes the story more interesting.   Starlite Motel is supposedly about real people, but one can tell it has lots...

Here it is, finally: the reading report for January. (February‘s report is in the works: I have it entered into Excel and I just need to transfer it into Word, edit the layout and write the preface. It will either take a couple of days or a couple of months). I finished 26 books in January, although admittedly a number of them were novellas. As I mentioned in my previous post, I delved into a new(ish) type of genre: gay (or M/M) romance. I found everything from genuinely sweet romance to hardcore BDSM, in sub-genres like fantasy, suspense and mystery and even a quartet of entertaining (and unlikely) rock star romances. Other books I read in January include the highly enjoyable memoir of cooking doyenne Julia Child, two straight romances, and Jennifer Worth‘s trilogy of memoirs about her experiences as a midwife in a London slum in the 1950s. I also watched the first season of the TV series based on these books and may (I say 'may') write something about this when I have fini...