Skip to main content

Reading report for March 2009

I have amazed myself again by reading a total of 22 books in one month. By the 18th it looked like I would manage, without having planned it, to read a book a day in March. That’s when I decided to slow down for a few days to rest my eyes. I’m happy I did, because while reading is good, so is spending time with friends and family.

Besides that, I had my tax report to turn in. It was unusually complicated this year, as I had five sources of income to report besides my regular salary, including a grant, some per diem money and my freelance translation work. Some of this was tax-deductible while some wasn’t, and some was tax-free and some was not. Sometimes, especially come tax-time, I think this freelance business is really too complicated to bother with, but now all I have to do is look at my new car and think "I wouldn’t have this if it wasn’t for my freelance work", and it stops being a problem.

The challenges are rolling along on schedule or better. I finished:
5 Top Mysteries challenge books,
4 Icelandic books, and
6 books that had been in my TBR stack for over a year, plus 3 more that I have owned for less than a year.

I am still accumulating new books slightly faster than I can read and cull the old ones, mostly because books from my vast wishlist keep becoming available on BookMooch.

Books I read in March:
Annette Blair: The Kitchen Witch (romance)
Meg Cabot: All American Girl (young adult book)
G.K. Chesterton: The Man who was Thursday (novel)
Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent (psychological thriller)
Edmund Crispin: The Moving Toyshop (mystery)
Colin Dexter: The Dead of Jericho (mystery)
E.M. Forster: A Room with a View (classic romance)
Mark Hebden: Pel and the Faceless Corpse (mystery)
Patricia Highsmith: Strangers on a Train & The Talented Mr. Ripley (psychological thrillers)
Pico Iyer (issue editor) & Jason Wilson (series editor): The Best American Travel Writing 2004 (collection of travel articles)
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (mystery thriller)
Cathie Linz: Between the Covers (romance)
Rory Maclean: Stalin's Nose (travelogue)
MasterCard Iceland: Umhverfis jörðina með MasterCard (travel guide, promotional)
Frances Mayes: Under the Tuscan Sun (fixer-upper memoir/travelogue)
Ruth Rendell: A Judgment in Stone (psychological thriller)
Stefán Jón Hafstein & Kristinn Jón Guðmundsson: New York! New York! (being there story/travelogue)
Fred Vargas: The Three Evangelists (mystery)
Pat & Dennis Welch (text); Mike Dowdall & Pat Welch(images): Humans (humour, comic book)
Yrsa Sigurðardóttir: Þriðja táknið (Last Rituals) & Sér grefur gröf (My Soul to Take) (mysteries)

Next month’s upcoming reads include 5 more Top Mysteries challenge books that I have on loan from the library and need to return before the end of the month. I plan to read fewer mysteries in April than I did in March and concentrate more on other types of novels and on non-fiction. I hope to take at least half of what I read in April from the TBR stack.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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
Post a Comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme
Post a Comment
Read more