Weekly Monday Round-up (November 7, 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:
On Friday I feared I would have to report that had not finished any books during the week, because I have been book-hopping all week long, reading a chapter here and a chapter there, and never being able to concentrate on any one book for long enough to get really and properly into reading it. The upside of this is that I decided to stop reading one book from my very long list of partially read books and chucked it in the "cull" stack.

Then I happened to pick up a shortened, sumptuously illustrated edition of Sir Richard Burton's translation of Sheikh Nefzawi's 15th century Arabic sex manual, The Perfumed Garden. I ended up finishing it in two sessions and found it an enjoyable read. Burton's translation is playful and interspersed with the advice and instructions on all sorts of things relating to sex, like funny nicknames for the genitalia, aphrodisiac foods, sexual positions and the kind, are erotic stories that sparkle with humour. I was pleased to see the emphasis that the text puts on the enjoyment of coition by both participants, and not just the man. Bafflingly, the book is illustrated with what looks to me like Indian erotic miniature paintings that would not have been out of place in an edition of the Kama Sutra but strike a somewhat false note in this book.

The playful, literary style of The Perfumed Garden compares very favourably with the style of a couple of short erotic romances I then read over the weekend. Both were very much in the "insert tab A in slot B, agitate, repeat" style of sex writing and I don't think I'll bother mentioning the titles.

The final book I finished was Elizabeth's Adventures in Rügen by Elizabeth Von Arnim, which I read as an eBook, downloaded from Project Gutenberg. This author wrote one of my favourite novels, The Enchanted April, and several years ago I also read a couple of semi-fictional books she wrote about her life in Germany. As I am planning to visit Rügen next summer, I figured it might be interesting to read it, to perhaps glean some insights into visit-worthy places on the island, and also to see what it was like around 115 years ago. I don't think I shall say any more at this point, as I feel I need to write down some of my thoughts about it, which will probably end up in a review.

This week's TBR:

As always, I have no idea what I will read during the week, but I am about halfway through Common Ground by Rob Cowen. It's the kind of naturalist book I love to read, an in-depth study of nature in all it's glories and cruelties, seasonal changes and slow rhythms. I'll definitely be reviewing this one.
I am alternating reading the above with Campervan Crazy.
I would also like to finish one of the partially read books from the monster list.

Other activities:
I did no watch any DVDs - nor did I watch TV - and the only things I did out of my ordinary activities during the week was to admit to myself that one part of the 6-week exercise program I am doing, the one involving exercise bikes, is too strenuous for me, because exercise is not supposed to hurt so much. I have the stamina - just about - but my muscles are not recovering fast enough to be pain-free when the weight-lifting part of the program rolls around 5 days later. Plus, it's not the good kind of pain, but the kind that comes from overexertion, so I plan to drop the two remaining exercise bike sessions and instead concentrate on the weight-lifting and hot yoga classes and do some less strenuous open classes to get some extra calorie-burning into the program. Zumba sounds pretty good.

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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