Reading report for September 2016

I decided to resurrect the monthly reading reports I used to post back when I was last actively blogging. Why, I hear you ask, since I am already publishing weekly reports? Well, they are mostly for me, to make it easier to have an overview of a whole month’s reading in a single post, but if someone else finds them useful, well, so much the better. Here is the first one:

I finished 15 books in September, of which 3 were rereads and 12 were first-time reads. That is: I think that's how it goes because I can’t be sure about Agatha Christie as I read a number of her books before I started keeping records of my reading.

11 were fiction in 3 genres and 2 were non-fiction in the same number of genres. Finally 2, The Darwin Awards II and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, were a mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Nearly half the books, 7 in all, were by Agatha Christie, so it can be said I got back into reading mysteries with a vengeance in September. In addition to the seven, there were 3 more mysteries and altogether they fall into 3 sub-genres. All the Christies are contemporaries, i.e they take place more or less around the time when they were written, whereas the Cadfael books are historicals and the first Fables book is fantasy, but still a mystery, with a detective, helper and very clever criminals.

My favourite of the month was Show Me the Magic, and I also greatly enjoyed the first Fables book and the last chapter of the Darwin Awards book. All of the books were enjoyable to some extent and I do not regret reading any of them, but I do regret not having read more books, because I had ample time to do so.

I know I am not going to beat last year’s record number of 329 read books, but I might still be able to top 2014s 194 books. I only have 20 books to go to achieve that goal.

The books:

Annie Caulfield: Show Me the Magic: Travels Round Benin by Taxi. Travelogue. Reading challenge book.
Agatha Christie: Dead Man's Folly by Agatha Christie. Mystery. A Hercule Poirot novel. Reread.
Agatha Christie: Death in the Clouds. Mystery. A Hercule Poirot novel.
Agatha Christie: The Golden Ball. Short story collection (mystery, suspense and romance).
Agatha Christie: Hickory Dickory Dock. Mystery. Another Hercule Poirot novel.
Agatha Christie: The Murder at the Vicarage. Mystery. The first Miss Marple book. Reread.
Agatha Christie: Sad Cypress. Mystery. Another Hercule Poirot outing.I don't think I had read this one before, but I can't be sure since I read a number of Christie novels long before I began keeping records of my reading.
Agatha Christie: Towards Zero. Mystery. A Superintendent Battle mystery.
Dave Heyhoe & Damien Lewis: It's All About Treo: Life, Love and War with the World's Bravest Dog. Memoir.
Jean Kerr: Please Don't Eat the Daisies. Humorous essays about motherhood, family and anything else the author could think of.
Wendy Northcutt: The Darwin Awards II. Stories, true and untrue, of deaths both tragic and funny.
Ellis Peters: The Hermit of Eyton Forest. Historical mystery. Book 14 of the Brother Cadfael mysteries.
Ellis Peters: The Confession of Brother Haluin. Historical mystery. Book 15 of the Brother Cadfael mysteries.
Andreas Staïkos: Les Liaisons Culinaires. Novella. A funny story about love and food.
Bill Willingham and co.: Fables 1 & 2. Fantasy. Collected comic book editions.

The TBR stack (owned) now stands at 803. This means I am reading my books at about the same speed as I am acquiring them.

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

Reading in Reykjavík

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