Weekly Monday Round-up (October 24, 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:

Berlitz Travel Guide: Rhine Valley from Cologne to Mainz, 1988/1989 edition. I love reading old travel guides, and this was no exception. It's one of those condensed mini-guides with information of the kind designed to whet one's appetite, which suits me just fine. It also proves what I have said about old travel guides: you can still use them for certain things even if they are decades out of date. This particular one was a trip back in time, as it was published while Germany was still divided and Bonn was the capital of the western part. However, the cities described in it still stand, and so do the old buildings described in it, and the nature and landscapes still continue to attract, so that part is still valid, and I will of course follow it up with more in-depth reading and more recent information.

Dragonology by Dugald A. Steer and a team of illustrators and designers. This is the kind of book I would have loved as a child. Still do, as a matter of fact. It's not as detailed in the recounting of dragon lore and dragon natural history as The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson, another piece of draconology/cryptozoology which I read and reviewed in January, but it is just as rich in illustrations, possibly richer, if anything, and of course it was written for children. It is a sumptuous book, beautifully illustrated and worth owning, and designed to arouse further interest in the subject.

The Odd Job by Charlotte MacLeod. Cozy murder mystery. Also a funny one. It has been years since I read one of the Sarah Kelling/Max Bittersohn mysteries, but it was just as much fun as I remembered them being. The mystery was mysterious up to a point, but it's really the characters that shine in MacLeod's books.

Books I acquired last week:
I didn't buy any books, but rescued three from the freebies bin at a charity shop:
Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut,
a Latin primer (in Danish) and
a companion volume containing a glossary and etc. for the Latin primer.

Other bookish activities:
I created two book jars.

One is themed, using categories from past What's in a Name reading challenges along with some additions of my own and is meant to be used for a challenge I thought up.

The other contains no less than the titles of all of my TBR books as of Friday a fortnight ago and is meant to be dipped into when I really just want to read and don't care what. Both jars have had the wonderful effect that I have so far had no problem at all of deciding what to read. I have already read a handful of books that are included in the jar and can therefore be safely discarded should I happen to pull them out of it the next time I fall into a reading slump. It also looks quite nice sitting beside all my TBR books.

Other stuff:
I have been struggling with episodes of dizziness, pressure headaches and occasional stabbing pains in my ears for the last couple of weeks. I finally decided to see a doctor, and guess what? My GP is unavailable this week. I am therefore going to an open clinic after work today. I hope it's just otitis, because the other possibility, Ménière's Disease, is not something I like to think about. My mother has that, and it's apparently hereditary.

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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