Skip to main content

Book haul for the week 5-12 September 2016

Note: I did not intend to buy any books last week, but I came across so many interesting ones that I broke the promise and as a result my TBR stack has once again swelled to over 800 books. Oh, well, at least they were cheap.

I had read two, or possibly three, of them before. I read a lot af Agatha Christie novels in my teens and I can't be sure if I have read some of them until I reread them, and sometimes not even then.
They are Hickory Dickory Dock, The Body in the Library and Postern of Fate. I bought them because it suddenly occurred to me that I would quite like to own all of her mystery novels.

I'm pretty sure I haven't read Death in the Clouds before, and I know I haven't read Death Comes as the End, which I intend to remedy soon, since it seems to be on a number of lists of Christie's best novels.

As for the rest:
  • I am just about ready to forgive Peter Ackroyd for the bloated mess that was the second half of London: The Biography, and The Clerkenwell Letters looks too short to be bloated.
  • I have an interest in costume history and have several books on the subject. Costume & Fashion looks like a good addition to the collection, and it has lots of pictures.
  • I have wanted to read Aron Ralston's book for some time, and 
  • The Colour of Heaven and The Perfume Collector looked interesting, but it remains to be seen whether I read them or not.

If you have a suggestion as to which of these books I should tackle first, please leave a comment with your recommendation.

Note: I will be in Denmark until Sunday and any comments will not become visible until I get back and approve them.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
9 comments
Read more