Reading Report, 20 February 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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I have only finished one book in the last week: Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch.
I began reading it weeks ago, but something interfered and I set it aside. Then I had a hankering after something funny and fantastical, and so I sat down and finished this humorous urban fantasy. There wasn't nearly as much mayhem and destruction as in the first book in the series, Rivers of London, but the author continues to develop characters from the previous book. The author left one part of the plot unresolved and it looks like it will continue on into the next book. I only hope this doesn't become an endless series in which the villain is always the same Moriarty-like mastermind.

I expect to finish Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron this week. I finally got to the point in the book where there was no going back, after having had a rough start of it, but since I have read several of Thubron's books before I knew I had to give myself some time to get into it. I do find his imagined conversations with a long-dead merchant traveller of the Silk Road slightly annoying, but those passages have fortunately not been too long.

I have also read one chapter of the King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany and am looking forward to continuing to read it. I had forgotten the beauty of Dunsany's prose (I read a number of his short stories many years ago) and am very much looking forward to immersing myself in this story once I finish Thubron's travelogue.

My newest slow read, 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, is proving to be a disappointment. I am only on the first chapter and am finding the tone almost intolerably snobbish and the majority of the places I have read about so far have been hotels or restaurants of the "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it" type (and a version of that phrase has actually been used once already in writing about one of the recommended restaurants). I almost feel as if I have strayed back into the days when travel for leisure was only for the rich and the guidebooks were written for people with plenty of money. This is really a pity, because the book is well organised and full of useful information, e.g. opening hours and seasonal closings, addresses, phone numbers and so on.

In other news: My oldest and best friend got married last weekend, so I got to attend a lovely, intimate wedding.This was the culmination of 16 years of cohabiting and the couple's two children were happy and just a bit bewildered by it all. I didn't have a lot of time to make them them a wedding present, because they only announced with a week's notice, but I gave them a small quilt that I made many years ago, with a Sunbonnet Sue and Overall Bill theme that was suitable for the occasion:

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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