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

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...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

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...