stuff I read this summer or up until like september or so

When we went to Ireland I ploughed through my sister's Agatha Christies and some kids' books they had. And when I got home I was still on an Agatha Christie kick so I borrowed some more at the library and have also been watching Miss Marple on Netflix like some mad thing (the Joan Hickson ones, natch). I tried the Hercule Poirot too but that was just too camp; I couldn't take it. I can't believe they spent (or spend!) so much time and effort at all these Agatha Christie series and made them so shite. Those stiff actors who seem to be sitting on set just waiting for their lines, which they then deliver with the most obvious of acting cues, in manner of school play. I'm surprised they know what to do with their hands, I wouldn't raise an eyebrow if they stood there with their appendages dangling limply or with fingesrs laced together awkwardly over their crotch area, like true amateurs do. Really dire. But after a terrible first four or so episodes the Joan Hickson series does pick up a bit, and she is an excellent Marple. The best, the tops. However, what I like about vintage detective fiction is that there really is a lot of subtext and information about society at the time going on under a repetitive sort of over-structure , and I don't see why they ever pick up on this and play it up a bit when they film the stories. They could easily tweak them darker, or turn a spotlight just ever-so-slightly on the implied gay relationships (I'm not asking for new storylines to be added, thus corrupting the original story, mind, just more interesting bits), or just do anything instead of falling into that god-awful trap of going bananas over the costumes.  Costume away, my dear friends, but think Mad Men instead - script and eye candy. Also - please be period correct!  And a lot of information needed to understand the characters involved seems to go missing in the filming - understandable, because you don't want a scene with somebody reciting the biography of X, Y and Z, in the way you can in a novel, but at the same time it's worth pointing out that it is possible to shed light on the background and motivations of people in films too without voice-overs or recitals. Scripts people, they need work.

Now, I still can't say Christie's my favourite. My previous grumbles do stand, but I'm warming to her. She's uneven though, isn't she? I still find it difficult to guess the killer, which I put down to needing more information than what is given. I am probably in the wrong, since I admittedly don't read carefully enough. Anyway, brief notes below based on memory alone - I'm writing this post in mid-September and half the books were read in mid-August.

4.50 from Paddington is one of my favourites. A great suspenseful killing on a train, that is only witnessed by accident. Maybe I'm just a sucker for train anything after commuting for so long and having a son who was train mad as a youngster. I also like the general set-up, the crumbling grand house in the middle of a changing community, the clever young woman who helps miss Marple by taking a post as housekeeper. Pleasing.

A Pocket Full of Rye is a little less good. A little too fantastical. Also, one has to make a few imaginative jumps here to guess the killer, surely? It's not obvious just from the clues in the text, is it? Or am I stupid? (Don't answer that.)

The Princess Bride: OMG OMG OMG I've wanted to read this for soooo long, why haven't I? And there it was, in my niece's bookshelf!

I have, of course, loved the film since childhood, and I remember my cousin (who introduced me to it) saying that it was based on this book, and she'd heard that the ending was actually really sad and that the spells wore off so Wesley died and Buttercup returned to Humperdinck. I am very grateful that the ending isn't quite so sad. More ambiguous. This is funny, entertaining, and clever. I don't know what I'd have made of it as a child/teen, if I could have appreciated the way fact and fiction is melded; Goldman writes as though he's adapting an original novel, written by S. Morgenstern, and the book is riddled with notes on what Morgenstern's (boring) original is like, why Goldman is cutting those bits out, loads of commentary on Goldman's own private life (all lies), and this edition has the epilogue where Goldman is bypassed by Morgenstern's estate for the sequel in favour of Stephen King. It's just brilliant. I think I'd have swallowed all the lies, until clocking (being a European after all), that there are no such places as Florin and Guilder. The question is how long it would have taken me. I was confused even now, as an adult. Awesome.

A Wrinkle in Time: Why is this book a classic? One of the poorest works of fiction I've ever read. I am so confused. Not one proper character in the whole book.

Benny and Omar: This was fun to read, but I don't know if it's very good, really. It reads like Colfer went to Tunisia and thought he might make a book out of that, but not like a tonne of research went into it. It was funny to read while in Wexford and hearing the "syrupy accent", that the Tunisians fail to recognize as English, live.

Endless Night is an artsy Agatha Christie. Inside the mind of the killer and all that. Meh, really. Not badly written, just not interesting beyond the props.

Ask a Policeman was a bit of a disappointment. It's a collaboration between several members of The Detection Club:  Anthony Berkely, Milward Kennedy, Gladys Mitchell, John Rhode, Dorothy Sayers and Helen Simpson. Each writer (except Rhode who writes the general set-up first chapter and a concluding one if I remember correctly) wrote a chapter featuring another writer's favourite sleuth. This is a highly entertaining premise if you are accquainted with said sleuths already so you can appreciate the jokes even better - but sadly I am not. I've only read Mitchell and Sayers out of this lot (I borrowed the book because of Sayers, obviously). Frankly I was bored to tears by the end when Rhode worked through the "true" solution. Sayers's bit was very good though. It's worth reading the Goodread's reviews on the book, by the way. The preface in this edition is by Agatha Christie, but was originally written for a Soviet magazine or something so it's not book-specific. (Any mistakes in facts now are due to me having to return this book before writing any notes - someone had put in a reservation for it at the library. Imagine!)

I don't remember what this one is about at all. Let me google... Oh right! Now I remember!  There were bits of this that I quite liked, but I didn't like how everyone was perfectly okay with a child dying because he was "a horrid boy". So that's alright then, push him out the window. Right. Makes perfect sense. Put that in your Discovery channel documentary "What Made Britain a Sick Sick Place", thank you. It's all jolly good and I say and then KILL THE KIDS.

Ah, this was Christie being clever again, causing outrage among the readers I believe. She'd claim she's not breaking the whodunnit rules, but I don't know - she's definitely bending them. I was surprised at the solution but I don't know if I approve. Tut tut.







Aaannnnddd finally a Marian Keyes I picked up on a whim. This novel must have been written during her latest bout of depression. It's very sad in places, very moving. Unfortunately also a bit uneven. The story doesn't hang together all the way. I wonder why these aren't being filmed? If this was a Swedish writer in Sweden the film deals would have come so fast, you guys.

She should allow herself to not have to be funny, I think she could write a better book. That said, the depressing paint scheme of the missing singer's house is hilarious! I found a quote on Goodreads so I'm pasting it in here, since I don't have the book anymore: “He'd done his walls with paint from Holy Basil. God, I yearned for their colors. I hadn't been able to afford them myself but I knew their color chart like the back of my hand. His hall was done in Gangrene, his stairs in Agony and his living room--unless I was very much mistaken--in Dead Whale. Colors I personally very much approved of.”  Paint colours for the depressed! 

Agatha Christieand Dorothy Sayers x 2, also Ngaio Marsh and Joseph Smith Fletcher x 1, respectively

What I'm actually reading now, to sound like a tv chef, is Alice Munro (for my book discussion club). It's just that my recent setback at work left me not only very down (although I'm better now) but also with a strong hankering for detective fiction, my old love. More specifically for the vintage, Golden Age type of detective fiction that don't over-analyse things and revel in upholding the status quo. Escapism, in other words. I only kept away from Tolkien (the ultimate escapism) because it, frankly, makes me cry, and from The Left Hand of Darkness because I felt I was being too pathetic re-reading that again so soon (at least, it feels as though I re-read it very recently). So detective fiction it was.

Agatha Christie duo

So, both Death Comes as the End and Black Coffee. One after the other. That's cured me for a while. Reading one okay book seems to have led me to forget all the others I didn't like. I think I was lured into it by the recently watched Doctor Who episode that shows Christie in a favourable light. And it wasn't even particularly clever, even considering how low my Doctor Who expectations are.

Black Coffee is the best one. Originally a play, it's been adapted into a book by Charles Osborne. In the foreword/introduction Christie's grandson says well done, Osborne, you'd never know it wasn't the Dame. Well, I think you kinda would. I mean, you can tell it's a play ... although perhaps I see it cuz I know it? But I think not, I think it is obvious. And I don't think that it would look like that if Christie herself had adapted it, because she'd have rewritten more. I think. Anyway, it's full of clichés and monotony and it's easy to spot the killer. But on a posititive note - it must be fun to watch in on the stage! You see everything happen before your very eyes, and then you have to think, did I see who did it? After all, when reading it's simple. It's basically laid out for you, right under your nose. So, it probably works really well as a play. Story: Poirot called to house of scientist who has invented new explosive, arrives just as scientist drops dead in armchair surrounded by entire household plus Italian guest. Quite silly. Like every Christie parody ever written I suppose.

Death Comes as the End is worse, because it's pretentious. "As the wife of a prominent archaeologist" as the introduction puts it, Christie had learned a lot about ancient Egypt and set this story there. A young widow, Renisemb, returns to her father's house with her little daughter, just as he returns from a business trip and brings along a new concubine. The concubine is spiteful and catty and ends up dead. When more people start dying it is assumed that it's her ghost doing it, but Renisemb and the household scribe, Hori, unravel the truth. By means of gazing into the sunset and saying inane stuff that's meant to seem profound as hell, mostly. God it's boring. I struggled. There has to be some flesh and blood even in a fictional character, after all!

Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders

I know I know, I'm not that keen on Christie. I borrowed this on whim because I recognized the title but hadn't read it, and I was desperate for some vintage.

As stories and plots go this one is actually quite good. A serial killer challenges Poirot before he starts murdering people in alphabetical order. He signs his letters ABC and leaves an ABC railway guide by the corpses. There are intriguingly modern discussions on the motivations of a serial killer - a well-known alienist is called in to do what we today would call a profile on the killer. Nothing new under the sun, eh? However, Poirot is such an annoying character and Hastings really doesn't improve things. Bleurgh. The end did surprise me a good bit though. If you're into this type of stuff I recommend it.

A few moments of peace...

Mr Bani has actually gone off to Paris with his work, so I'm on my lonesome with the kids. This means I get to use the laptop. Somehow it's easier to use the laptop - probably because it's soooo quiet. Lovely. Now, if only the FUCKER UPSTAIRS WOULD STOP RIVERDANCING aaaahhhh I think I heard a SHHHH from the parents - this place it sometimes ludicrously un-sound-proofed (English lacks a word there I feel).

The first book from Elaine Viets Mystery Shopper series is called Dying in Style. I liked it better than the second, but I don't like this series as much as the Dead-End Job one. The shopping tips at the end of the book are fun though, if somewhat US-specific ( but hey, I'm not dissing, that's where she lives). She is apparently recovering from her stroke - good for her!

Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced was first published in 1950, and is full of references to war, rationing, black market and the like. I don't know what I'm trying to say by mentioning that, but somehow it makes for a better book, possibly because it feels very genuine and thus makes the whole book seem genuine. After all Dame Agatha, like all other Brits, must have experienced it all first-hand, whereas she probably never got too close to actual murder scenes.

This is a Miss Marple book. In a rural community a murder is announced in the local paper's personal ads. A group of people gather at the house in question, assuming a murder game is in the offering (murder games do turn up frequently in crime fic of this era I've noticed). However, a real murder takes place, and Miss Marple turns up to solve it. Definitely one of the better Christies I've read - not saying much.

Laurie R. King: The Art of Detection - aaahhhh I waited for this one. I loved it. While reading it I wanted to blab about lots of different things in it, but of course I took no notes (was in breast-feeding agony) so poo to me.

A Sherlock Holmes aficionado and collector is found murdered in an almost inaccessible spot. Turns out that the very same spot is where the corpse is found in a purported lost Holmes story he had unearthed, and was hoping to make a fortune from, not to mention create a stir with. Kate Martinelli is back on cop duty here. I was so pleased to see that herself and Lee are doing so well and have a lovely daughter. (I'm sad, i know. They're not real people *repeat to fade*)

The Holmes story is, to those of us familiar with the Russell series, obviously "true". However, to Kate, living in our reality, Sherlock Holmes was an entirely fictional figure. We the readers recognize the tone and style from the Russell books and "know" that this is not at all fiction, and here everything becomes charmingly meta-something and post-modern (possibly). I was smitten by it. It's like being in a special club. I wonder how much non-initiates could appreciate of the book though, since the cross-over bits are what made the novel great IMO.

Thank you Laurie!

Now, a bit of a find: Gladys Mitchell: Late, late in the evening (the link there is for a tribute page, nothing official). Apparently Gladys is a Big Deal. I'd never heard of her. The shame, the shame.In my defence the library seem to have only two of her novels. Two. She has written (I now know) 86 (unless I miscounted). And short stories. More to the point, she's good. Sure, the cover has the usual blurbs "as good as Dorothy Sayers" one says, but I can now say with certainty that it's true (well, perhaps not AS good as Sayers, not much is).

Her heroine is Miss Bradley, who later on becomes Dame. Being lazy today, allow me to link you to synopsis (-es?) of the book here and here. I was very taken by this too. I loved the way we got the story from different points of view - we start off with the children telling it, but as adults, so we are hearing about something that happened in Miss Bradley's past, but one can assume that the devoted reader has lots of background info about what happens to Margaret and Kenneth and Miss Bradley later, and this is charming in itself. Then Miss Bradley sometimes takes over the narrative - but in letters to a friend. And other letter-writers pitch in too. It could be just confusing, as though the author hadn't made up her mind, but it works. Oh, and Miss Bradley is a psychologist - which is pretty awesome for a character created in 1929 or whatever.

My only mark-down might be for a slightly undramatic ending, but it does fit with the narrative style, and also possibly that the children's dialogue is slightly precocious.

Now, how am I going to get hold of more of her novels?

Why is Agatha Christie so popular?

Uh-huh.

My copy of Unnatural Death has about a thousand printing errors in it. I am seriously disappointed. Luckily I have read it before, so I knew that it wasn't meant to be incomprehensible in the places where it was incomprehensible. Now, do I chuck the book (that rhymes, pleasingly)? I can no longer lend it to my editor friend, she'll go into crazy work mode and explode.

Then I re-read Ten Little Niggers. Note: I have never read the book in English, and it's been at least ten years or so since I read it in Swedish. This time around, I was struck by how mediocre it was, really. Not at all as scary as I remember. Plus, the constant use of the word nigger really grates on you. Makes you want to turn up on the island and smack everyone upside the head. In the Swedish translation it was neger, which is not, you know, good, but it's better than nigger. Must've been an excellent translation on the whole, since it made me love the book so much for so many years. She's terribly overrated, Agatha Christie. Don't understand it at all. This is the only book that's ever done anything for me, and now I find out it's all a lot of ... ... ... ... at the end of every single fecking sentence.

Then my husband's colleague (also my former teacher, did I mention that? Pretty cool) lent me 44 Scotland Street, not knowing that I've read it. Still very sweet gesture that I appreciate, and I also got a present! A little Reading Diary. So I shan't be needing to blog anymore, I guess. ;-)

Then I got sick. *coughs* So I'm mostly lying in bed reading Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country, laughing out loud. Because, let's face it, Australians are funny without even trying. The accent is enough. Bill Bryson just ices the cake, really.

Cheating on Moby

So at 2 o'clock Saturday morning my husband came back from Paris. He had naturally (for him) left something behind somewhere along his itinerary, this time his jacket with his house keys - luckily only in the car that gave him a lift from the airport shuttle. Anyway, he had to ring me to let him in. At 2 o'clock in the morning. Brutal.

Anyway, he bought me books. In English. It's funny really, how one of his favourite stops in Paris is Shakespeare and Company, a more or less English-language bookshop, but then he doesn't speak French. He got me The Girl Who Married a Lion by Alexander McCall Smith, which is a collection of African stories/fabels. Probably very good, so I'm glad to now own it, but I'd come across it before and elected not to read it since I didn't want to read fairy tales at the time. But it'll come in handy one day, I'm sure. Also he bought A Walk In The Woods by Bill Bryson - again, a favourite of mine. I'm always in stitches reading his books, and it's best when he's writing about things I know nothing or little of, as I won't spot any glaring errors then. ;-) This is a good one, of how he and his annoying friend Katz hike the Appalachian Trail. A lot of info, environmental debate, hilarious episodes. Recommended.

Also, yesterday down town I bought myself two books, because they were there. For any out of town readers I have - in Uppsala, on Saturdays, you find second-hand book stalls along a part of the river. Sort of "diet Paris" style. On my way to my bike I peeked, and found two old paperbacks: Ten Little Niggers by Agatha Christie, and Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers.

Ten Little Niggers was obviously renamed Ten Little Indians later for the film (which the cover of my paperback also points out, almost apologetically). It's a truly awful title, I cringe even typing the word. But hey, those where the times, that's the word she used, I can't change it. :-/ Substituting "indians" for "niggers" is really not a great improvement either. This is still one of the creepiest crime stories I've ever read. Admittedly, I haven't read it for years, I might start picking holes in it now, but as a child on summer holidays with my grandparents in Värmland I'd always read their (Swedish) copy, and it freaked me out. Storyline is that ten people are invited to a mansion on an isolated island. They don't know the others or that they are coming, and have nothing in common. They think. Once there, the supposed host is missing. A recording informs them that they are all going to be punished for being murderers that have escaped the law. And then they die, one by one. Most chilling.

Unnatural Death is Sayers' third Lord Peter novel, so he's still very much happy-go-lucky and debonair in character. Not that he ever really was, if you read between the lines. Sayers was much too good a writer for that. I love her work, and have read all her Lord Peter novels, including the one finished by Jill Paton Walsh (Thrones, Dominations). So I've already read this one too, but couldn't pass up a chance to own it for 20 crowns. Anyway, I don't seem to remember every detail of the storyline, so I'll have to re-read it sometime - the snappy Lord Peter dialogue should make it well worth it! It's something about an old woman who dies, and some people suspect her nurse murdered her. The doctor however concludes that there was no foul play involved, but Lord Peter is interested and starts picking at the problem. Then the maid is murdered, and things escalate.

The best thing about this one is the introduction of the estimable Miss Climpson, the shrewd middle-aged lady who sleuths for Lord Peter, writes lengthy italicized letters and runs his secretary school (or whatever it is). She's great. Oh, and there is a Reverend Hallelujah Dawson in this one, that's something to remember.

Staying off the Internet for Good Friday, therefore in an Update Panic, and how long can the title be? Pretty long, it seems.

That's the plan. So then of course I get really antsy and feel that OMG, I need to blog now, don't I? But I feel so restless and can't focus on giving my books and posts the TLC they deserve. Although, some books don't deserve TLC. I have recently started on two books that I just abandoned due to crapness. This is a skill (?) I have picked up in my old age. In my, like, youth I could not not finish a book, but hitting 30 and starting to sport a fetching moustache has made me realise that life is, indeed, much to short. So the books I ditched are The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern by Lilian Jackson Brown, and The Poisoned Chalice by Paul Doherty. The first one just didn't grip me, but I'll keep it around, just in case war breaks out and I become really desperate for something to read. The second is, according to the cover, the "best of its kind since the death of Ellis Peters". My arse it is. God, I was bored stiff with the narrator cum hero ten pages in. Argh. Could not cope. If you think frolic is a good word to use in a sexual context you might like this.

But this leads me on to Ellis Peters, whom I have read. Again. Yay! An Excellent Mystery is the latest find. I may have read all her Cadfael novels now, but I'm not completely sure. I am especially not sure if I view this as a good thing (job well done, closure) or with a sense of loss... Her other books are much harder to get a hold of, and they are a little less captivating. Her style works so brilliantly in a mediaeval (ha! spelt right on first attempt!) context.

In AEM the abbey recieves two brothers who are refugees from the war. Their home abbey has been burned to the ground and their brethren scattered. One is a former Crusade hero, the other his devoted mute helper. One day a soldier who used to serve under Crusade Hero's command turns up, to ask his blessing as he goes to court the hero's former betrothed. However, it turns out that the woman, who was supposed to have become a nun, has disappeared. And the hunt is on for clues, and meanwhile things are tense in Shrewsbury Abbey...

This book has a "gay" theme, much more explicitly than I expected. One of the brothers of the abbey is tormented by memories of the woman who scorned him and drove him to take vows. He is now tempted by two of the younger and better-looking brothers, and tries to find ways to get physical with them. Since this is Ellis Peters it doesn't get ugly, of course. No rape on her watch. But it's interesting that she isn't afraid to breach the issue. Well, and Brother Sex-Mad isn't gay even, he's just desperate. Which is also nice, that he isn't gay and therefore crazy. He's straight and crazy. Or temporarily so. In general there is theme of scandal in this book - brothers who can't stay away from tempations of the flesh, women in the monastery... I recommend it. It might not be a novel to bring to the Pride Parade... but it's enjoyable and thought-provoking.

After that I read an Agatha Christie I had nicked from Daddy's (who we helped move to a new flat last weekend - a great source of stress and anguish and another reason for not blogging). Murder on the Links, featuring Hercule Poirot. I'm not a mad Christie fan, and this isn't one of her strongest novels, IMO. I can't be arsed to go into detail, suffice it to say that the victim is found in a grave dug in a golf course. In France. It's set in France. However, it gets bonus points for Poirot being a little less of a caricature than usual. Well, not that I've read many Poirot mysteries or anything, but I remember him as a caricature, and I've never been that keen.

I also had borrowed a Margery Allingham novel, The Crime at Black Dudley, but I think I've read it. It starts with a dagger hunt in a dark house - pretty distinctive, and I know I've read that before... but for the life of me the rest is a blank. I can't have enjoyed it that much then, so I probably shouldn't bother re-reading, right?

Anyway, a Happy Easter to all of you who happen to read this! May you all find time for some påskekrim, regardless of where you are!