Weekly Monday Round-up (November 14, 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:
I seem to be out of the reading slump and am reading at full pace. The trick seems to be to not hesitate when choosing the next book, and to get reading right away and read enough to get yourself hooked. (Or maybe I have just been lucky in my choices).

I finished and reviewed (links lead to my reviews):

Common Ground by Rob Cowen. Natural history and meditation on man's place within nature.
Alice by Christina Henry. Fantasy. Dark spin-off of Alice in Wonderland.

I finished and haven't reviewed:

The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich. I may review this one, but in case I don't get round to it, it is a memoir of sorts about the US state of Wyoming, where Ehrlich first started visiting in the 1970s. She first came there to make a documentary about sheep farming, but kept returning and learned both shepherding and cowboying before she eventually got married and settled down on a ranch with her husband. It's the kind of book about a place and the people and animals that occupy it that I love to read.
The Pillow Book: An Illustrated Celebration of Eastern Erotica, edited by Charles Fowkes. This is an anthology/sampler of erotic writing and art from India, China and Japan that I acquired at the same time as The Perfumed Garden.
The audio book of A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie, read by Rosemary Leach.
Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis. Self-help and etiquette, humorous. A tongue in book of advice for single women on how to enjoy their singledom.
Single Female (Reluctantly) Seeks by Dixie Browning. Romance.

I am currently waiting for one book to arrive in the mail:

Rivers of London by Ben Aaranovitch. This is the first book in a fantasy/alternate reality detective series and was recommended to me as a book that other Terry Pratchett fans have enjoyed.

...and dithering about whether or not to order another:

Red Queen by Christina Henry.

I forgot to post about the books I acquired the week before last, so here is a double dose.

I have already read four of them and have started on a fifth.
Click to enlarge the photos so you can see the titles.

I'll be writing about them later in the week.

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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