Weekly Monday Round-up (October 17, 2016)

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Kathryn at the Book Date and is "a place to meet up and share what you have been, are and about to be reading over the week."

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

Books I finished reading last week:

• Not On the Label: What really goes into the food on your plate, by Felicity Lawrence.
• Appleby's End by Michael Innes. Mystery and a reread. As a matter of fact I discovered, when I was entering it into my reading "journal" (these days just an Excel file, but once I did keep a written reading journal and the name has stuck) that I first read it in October 2011, so it has been just about 5 years since the last time I read it.
• Ride Like Hell and You'll Get There by Paul Carter. Memoir. I read Carter's book about his life working on oil rigs, Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse, in 2014. This book isn't as funny, but it's also not as gruesome, and I had fun reading about his motorcycle escapades.
• The Mystery of Swordfish Reef by Arthur Upfield. Murder mystery. A Detective Inspector Bonaparte mystery I had not read before, and a long-standing TBR title. I'm thinking about  reviewing this one.

Books I bought last week:
None. Zero. Nada. I am very proud of myself.

Partially read books:
I was inspired to count my own partially read books by a post by Kristen at BookNAround, who admits to having 23 books with bookmarks living in them. I hope she is actively reading most of them, because I certainly am not actively reading more than three of my bookmarked books.

Several of the bookmarked volumes in the list below were books from which I had read one or more short stories for a short story reading challenge I did a few years ago, but there were also history books, biographies and novels in the mix, to mention just a few genres. I did remove bookmarks from several books I clearly had to start reading all over again, and didn't count those.

For many of these books I can see no reason why I stopped reading them, except possibly that something came up that required my attention and when I was able to go back to reading I had either forgotten about the book or lost interest in it.

I counted the following:

1. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. This is my current toilet reading book and I am making steady - if slow - progress.
2. 50 Great Horror Stories, edited by John Canning
3. A Blink of the Screen by Terry Pratchett
4. A Century of Detective Stories
5. A Century of Humour, edited by P.G. Wodehouse
6. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
7. A Treasury of American Horror Stories, edited by McSherry, Waugh & Greenberg
8. Antonio Carlucci's Italia
9. As they Were by M.F.K. Fisher
10. Be Still the Water by Karen Emilson
11. Below Stairs by Margaret Powell
12. Bluebeard's Egg by Margaret Atwood
13. Casanova by Ian Kelly
14. Completely Unexpected Tales by Roald Dahl
15. Cry of the Kalahari by Mark and Delia Owens
16. Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro
17. Deadly Slipper by Michelle Wan
18. Dust in the Lion's Paw by Freya Stark
19. Glamour's Big Book of Do's and Dont's
20. Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
21. Having Our Say by Sarah L. Delaney and A. Elizabeth Delaney with Amy Hill Hearth
22. I Shall wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett
23. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
24. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
25. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
26. Maigret Sets a Trap by Georges Simenon
27. Masterpieces of Mystery: The Golden Age-I, selected by Ellery Queen
28. Náttúra Íslands by various (essays on various aspects of the nature and geology of Iceland)
29. Origin in Death by J.D. Robb
30. Our Grandmother's Drums by Mark Hudson
31. Pax Britanica by James Morris
32. Plats du Jours by William Black
33. Pledged by Alexandra Robbins
34. Saga jólanna by Árni Björnsson (a history of Christmas by a respected Icelandic historian)
35. Shaking a Leg by Angela Carter
36. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, vol. I. It has been years since I started reading this, but that's okay since these are fairy tales (i.e. a form of short story) that don't need any particular attention to the wider context of the book.
37. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
38. The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart
39. The Devil's Delilah by Loretta Chase
40. The First Rumpole Omnibus by John Mortimer
41. The Good Women of China by Xinran
42. The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk
43. The Joy of Eating, edited by Jill Foulston
44. The Observations by Jane Harris
45. The Third Omnibus and 
46. The Seventh Omnibus by Georges Simenon (thankfully between books in both cases)
47. The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
48. True Tales of American Life, edited by Paul Auster
49. Venice: Tales of the City, selected by Michelle Lovric
50. What the Butler Saw by E.S. Turner
51. Where the Blue Begins by Christopher Morley
52. Women on the Case, Edited by Sara Paretsky

...and these were just the ones within easy reach.There are probably more hidden on shelves behind other books or languishing underneath the collection of stuff in my office.

I take no pride in having 52 books with bookmarks sticking out of them. There are some very readable books on that list that deserve better than to languish - sometimes for years - with bookmarks in their guts. This needs remedying.


Other things I did last week:

• Went to see the ABBA musical Mamma Mia! with my mother. Great fun was had by us both, and we would love to see it again before the show closes.
• Booked tickets to a Christmas concert - which is only a month and a half away, but you can never be too quick about booking any Christmas entertainment when you live in Reykjavik.
• Joined a gym for 6 weeks of training on weights and exercise bikes, offset by hot yoga once a week. This is in preparation for joining a weightlifting class - I figured I needed to build up some muscles before jumping into that pool. Because I have diabetes II it is very important for me to supplement my diabetes drugs with exercise, to keep my blood sugar levels normal.
• Listened to hours of podcasts while on my daily walks and while crocheting some amigurumi Christmas presents.
• Got a number of crocheted hexagons joined - there are 104 in all and hopefully they will all be joined into a bedspread in time for Christmas.
• Added some titles to my Invisible Library (shown in red).