Weekly Monday Round-up (September 19, 2016)

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Kathryn at the Book Date.

Visit the Book Date to see what various other book bloggers have been up to in the past week.

Reading challenge book I finished last week:
None.

Non challenge book I finished last week: Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie. (Another first-time read). A Hercule Poirot mystery. I have no plans to review it in full.
Micro-review: This is far from being Christie's best, but the final twist was interesting and goes against certain narrative conventions. This is possibly not the best book to take as a reading material on a flight, as I did.

Currently reading:
Death Comes As The End by Agatha Christie. Standalone historical mystery.

Reading challenge progress:
I still have 1 book left in What's in a Name, 2 to go in Nonfiction 2016 before I can level up or finish.

Last week's book haul:
I came across a small second-hand bookshop in Aarhus (more of that below) that was having a sale. I think I showed great restraint in only buying one book, but I made it count:

Other activities this week:

I attended a large translation studies conference in Aarhus, Denmark. I was there from Wednesday to Sunday, and the conference ran from Thursday to Saturday. Most of it was either about theoretical or practical research on translators and their work (e.g. quality assessment, ergonomics, revision), but a couple of the lectures I attended did touch on literary translation.I just wish I could have cloned myself for the occasion, because I missed several juicy lectures.

I went to Copenhagen on Sunday to catch my flight back home, and my GPS tracker tells me I walked around 12 kilometres that day. I got in a lot of sightseeing, two museums and an art gallery. It was my first time in Denmark for 19 years, but it was just like I had been there last week. I even remembered how to get from the central train station and down to Strøget, the main shopping area.

I got a chance to watch the first three episodes of Lucifer on the flight home. Must say I was disappointed to find it was a detective series, after having read the comics the TV series is based on. I'd say "based" in this case means they took the characters and settings and left out the story from the comics.

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 ...

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...

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...

Reading in Reykjavík

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