Reading report, February 13, 2017

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I didn't read much last week - didn't feel like making a push to finish any of the books I have been reading - but did finish one I have been steadily reading over the last couple of years:

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. This monster of a book is more than 900 pages long and I have been reading it bit by bit in the loo. It's funny (or perhaps not) that when I started it I was going "I've read that!" almost every time I turned a page, but after the 1920s these silent exclamations got fewer and fewer as I got closer to my own time, and I had only read a handful of the books published after 1990, although I own copies of several more that I plan to read when that mythical "one day" rolls around.

Much as I detest books and articles telling me I must do something, I found it interesting to see what books were chosen for inclusion in this volume. The edition I have is the original 2006 one, but I know the list has been changed in subsequent editions.

I figured it might be interesting to see how many of these books I have read, but I haven't been able to find the original 2006 list online and I am certainly not going to type it all up myself, so it will have to wait.

Its replacement in the loo is 1000 Places to See Before You Die. I expect that one will take at least a year to finish. I hope I may find some places in it that I deem worthy of visiting, but I am no more going to start chasing those places than I am going to read all the books in 1001 Books....

I have started reading Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron and expect to finish that in rather less time than 1000 Places.... I am having slight doubts about whether or not to continue reading it (Thubron can be a bit hard to get into, as I experienced when I read one of his previous books), but I am planning to give it the 50-page treatment before deciding.

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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