Reading report, 9. January 2017

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The reading year began well for me. I have finished three books so far, which is considerably fewer than the same time last year, but they were good books.

First came Thee Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story by Leonie Swann.

I found the idea of the story intriguing: a herd of sheep, a mixed bag of an old Irish heritage breed and some other breeds, some of them rescue animals, find their beloved shepherd dead in their pasture, a spade lodged in his abdomen. The humans around them don't seem too concerned or eager to investigate, so the sheep decide to solve the mystery themselves.

There is a sequel, about what happens to the sheep after the case is solved.

Then came Maigret and the Wine Merchant by Georges Simenon.

One of the things I love about Simenon's crime novels is that they are usually not all about finding out whodunit, but rather about proving that a particular person did it and finding out why. There is sometimes some uncertainty about the killer's identity, but it is usually cleared up around midway through the story, and the rest is a psychological chess game with the killer on one side and Maigret and his team on the other.

In this case, a rich wine merchant is murdered and no-one seems to care overmuch. Maigret's investigation reveals a man obsessed with being the boss, with an apparently insatiable appetite for sex that's driven by a need to dominate. A lot of people might have wished him dead, but who had the nerve?

The final book was All Fishermen Are Liars by Linda Greenlaw.

I first found out about Linda Greenlaw when I found her first book, The Hungy Ocean, at a book sale and bought it on a whim. I grew up in a fishing village in northern Iceland and heard and read a lot of sea stories. It was therefore interesting to read a sea story from another fishing culture.

This book is a collection of sometimes funny, often hair-raising sea stories, possibly true, possibly not, probably somewhere halfway in-between, framed by the story of the author and her concerns for the health of a good friend and her attempts to persuade him to go into retirement. I have another one of her books on my TBR shelf and will read it soon - if I can find it.

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 and

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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