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 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

Reading in Reykjavík

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