Reading report, 30 January 2017

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 last week.
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As for myself, I reread two books last week, and finished one first time read.

The rereads were:

Dogs and Goddesses by Jennifer Crusie, Anne Stuart & Lani Diane Rich. I needed a bit of zany fantasy and this fit the bill perfectly.
Crazy For You by Jennifer Crusie. A nice bit of romantic suspense.

The first time read was Marco Polo's Silk Road: The Art of the Journey. I'll say nothing about it for now, as I intend to review it.

As for other activities, I continued to weight-lift and then went on a long hike yesterday with my hiking group. This was a good 18 km in length, starting out on trails and then going on to trackless, rougher terrain alternating between beaches (sandy/rocky) and terrain composed of very tussocky stretches interspersed with short stretches of very rocky terrain, and then onto roads for couple of kilometres before we reached our cars (the cars are driven to the end-point, and the hikers are taken by bus to the starting point and then they hike back).

I was unlucky enough to forget my phone at home, so I could not track the hike, but my father was with me and he brought a GPS tracker. I also forgot to bring a camera, but never mind: it was cold and quite windy so I buried my head inside the hood of my sweater and that of my down jacket and wrapped a scarf around my neck, with the result that I could barely turn my head and my field of vision was mostly limited to the people walking ahead of me. I could only really look at the landscape when we stopped. I would love to repeat at least the wild part of this hike in good summer weather.

This is part 2 of an 8-part serial hike from Reykjavík to Botnsdalur, a beautiful nature area in Hvalfjörður. We go every second Sunday, and the last hike will take place on the Sunday after Easter Sunday. This suits me just fine, as on the following weekend I am setting off on an adventure...

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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