Skip to main content

Last week's book haul

As I said in my Monday post, I won this book in a prize drawing, or rather, I won 12$ towards buying a book, and I chose this one.

The reason for choosing it is simple: I own a VW campervan/motorhome myself, although mine is a 2014 VW Caddy Maxi and not a classic Transporter like the cars celebrated in this book.

The classic Transporters are called "rúgbrauð" in Icelandic, which means "rye bread" and probably comes from them being shaped and proportioned like a loaf of said bread.

I haven't had a chance to read the book yet - I barely managed to leaf through it before my mother commandeered it, but what I saw looked interesting.

The other books I acquired last week were all second hand:

The Reader's Digest Book of Handicrafts or something like it exists in at least three editions I know of and I seem to recall they all have different titles but much of the content in common. I have borrowed them from various friends and relatives over the years and as a matter of fact I own another version titled Reader's Digest Crafts & Hobbes, which shares several chapters with this one. That one is an American edition and this is a British one. It doesn't seem to matter when these books were published, there is always somewhat of a hippie quality to them.

Myths of China and Japan is a nice addition to my growing library of books on world mythology.

Salt, Sugar, Fat will be an interesting follow up to Not on the Label that I read in October.

Learn to Play the Guitar.Yes please! I lost interest in learning to play an instrument when I was sent to music school as a child and told I could not immediately start on the piano like I wanted to, but had to learn to play what I thought was the most boring musical instrument ever invented: the recorder. I had to learn that first and only then could I learn to play the piano. When no piano lessons were forthcoming after two very boring semesters of the recorder, I told my mother I didn't want to do it any more, and fortunately she listened. Just lately, I have been thinking about learning to play the ukulele, but when I came across this guitar book I decided to buy it and try the guitar instead, because I can borrow one from a friend.

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

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

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