Skip to main content

Reading report for October 2011

I finished a total of 10 books in October, which means that my reading index is slightly up, although it has not yet reached last year’s monthly average. In addition there was one Did Not Finish, which was rather unfortunate as it sounded very interesting when I was offered it for reviewing.

The books were a mixed bag of various genres, and I have reviewed no less than four of them. One review is already published (in 2 parts) and three more are coming up in the next couple of weeks, starting tomorrow.

Mary Balogh, Colleen Gleason, Susan Krinard, Janet Mullany :Bespelling Jane Austen. 4 paranormal romance novellas, 2 historical, 2 contemporary.
Jim Crace: The Devil's Larder. Short stories with a food theme.
Carola Dunn: Death at Wentwater Court. Cosy murder mystery; historical.
Rachel Gibson: Daisy's Back in Town. Romance, contemporary.
Kay Hooper: Lady Thief/Masquerade. 1 volume, 2 historical romances (1 short novel, 1 novella)
Michael Innes: Appleby's End. Mystery.
Nathaniel Philbrick: In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. History.
Carmen Posadas: Little Indiscretions. Crime, literary novel.
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, read by Stephen Fry. YA fantasy, audiobook. Reread.
Thornton Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Literary novel, historical.

DNF: The Undertaker by William Brown. 
I got sent this book for review and gave it the 25% test (the Kindle equivalent of the 50-page test for books with no pagination) before deciding that while the premise of the story is interesting and it is well-written, the style is not to my taste and I simply couldn’t work up enough sympathy for the narrator-hero to want to see what happens to him. However, others have given it good reviews, so don’t pass it on just because I didn’t like it enough to finish it.

As usual, I am reading Too Many Books At Once. Take a look:
Children of Kali by Kevin Rushby.Travelogue and history.
Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey
The Oxford Book of Oxford, edited by Jan Morris. History. Bathroom book that I expect to finish by mid-2012.
London: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd. History.
The Mysterious West, edited by Tony Hillerman. Short mystery stories set in the western USA.
Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon.Adventure tale.
Nul Points by Tim Moore. Travelogue/biography. Examination of what happened to the people unfortunate enough to come last in the Eurovision Song Contest with zero points.

These are just the ones I have read something in during the last week. I have about a dozen more I haven’t touched for weeks or months which are in various stages of being read. When I come out of a reading slump I tend to do it with a rush.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reading report for January 2014

Here it is, finally: the reading report for January. (February‘s report is in the works: I have it entered into Excel and I just need to transfer it into Word, edit the layout and write the preface. It will either take a couple of days or a couple of months).

I finished 26 books in January, although admittedly a number of them were novellas. As I mentioned in my previous post, I delved into a new(ish) type of genre: gay (or M/M) romance. I found everything from genuinely sweet romance to hardcore BDSM, in sub-genres like fantasy, suspense and mystery and even a quartet of entertaining (and unlikely) rock star romances. Other books I read in January include the highly enjoyable memoir of cooking doyenne Julia Child, two straight romances, and Jennifer Worth‘s trilogy of memoirs about her experiences as a midwife in a London slum in the 1950s. I also watched the first season of the TV series based on these books and may (I say 'may') write something about this when I have finis…

Stiff – The curious lives of human cadavers

Originally published in November and December 2004, in 4 parts. Book 42 in my first 52 books challenge.

Author: Mary Roach
Year published: 2003
Pages: 303
Genre: Popular science, biology
Where got: amazon.co.uk

Mom, Dad, what happens after we die?

This is a classic question most parents dread having to answer. While this book doesn’t answer the philosophical/theological part of the question – what happens to the soul? - it does claim to contain answers to the biological part, namely: what happens to the body?



Reading progress for Stiff:
Stiff is proving to be an interesting read. Roach writes in a matter-of-fact journalistic style that makes the subject seem less grim than it really is, but she does on occasion become a bit too flippant about it, I guess in an attempt to distance herself. Although she uses humour to ease the grimness, the jokes – which, by the way, are never about the dead, only the living, especially Roach herself – often fall flat. Perhaps it’s just me, but this is a serio…

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. You…
http://52books.blogspot.com/2011/11/reading-report-for-october-2011.html
52books.blogspot.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-47
209721
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:2KKK337HFUFIGW7XVHCKKGFKTZP5S4VX
<urn:uuid:10c2c0a0-b074-4887-9aed-21ba59649810>
2018-11-18T06:02:47Z
172.217.7.129
text/html
sha1:XWHILAPFQCMDR5JL5ITYVFDWAEMY5VPL
<urn:uuid:ced7b53f-3cac-4ecb-a29e-4bb58b1187a1>
http://52books.blogspot.com/2011/11/reading-report-for-october-2011.html
response
<urn:uuid:0ea9e067-56fb-4853-baf7-4d49540767c3>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-47
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-37-237-206.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/