Reading Wednesday

[troisoiseaux]

Recently read

Finished Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole, which was interesting but depressing - at times it felt like reading a social history on corruption and inequality in Nigeria - and, ultimately, sort of... listless? I totally understand ambivalence as an emotional response to returning to a place that was once home and is now simultaneously familiar and changed beyond recognition, but it made for rather detached reading.

Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie: I wasn't a big fan of this one. I spent most the novel waiting for something to actually spark my interest and then suddenly it was over, and I found the ending itself rather disappointing/frustrating. Like, you're telling me I just read an ENTIRE book based on the premise that the guy who they thought did it was actually innocent, only for it to turn out that he had in fact masterminded the murder, and his accomplice/the actual killer was the one person that everyone - herself included - spent the book musing would be a convenient scapegoat?! Just... ARGH. Plus, it was trying to be a psychological thriller, but all the psychology bits were distractingly bizarre and/or outdated - it was written in 1958 and had some jaw-dropping takes on motherhood, adoption, and nature vs. nurture - so that didn't do it any favors.

Read the second of Sophie Hannah's Agatha Christie continuation novels, Closed Casket, less for any merits of the novel itself than because of its ties to last year's absolutely bananas New Yorker exposé on the bewildering lies of mystery-thriller author Dan Mallory, who writes pseudonymously as A.J. Finn. The Cut has a good summary of how, exactly, Sophie Hannah is involved, but the short version is that she had worked with him in the past, found him so deeply suspicious she may or may not have hired a private detective to investigate his claims, and then made him a character in her novel.

The murder victim of Closed Casket is a charming, allegedly dying man who was made the sole beneficiary of his wealthy employer's will, only to be immediately murdered, at which point it's revealed - and this is the part she based on Dan Mallory - he was not only lying about his terminal illness, but had at one point impersonated his own brother to back up his story. Another character in the novel is an American who went to Oxford and subsequently fakes an English accent, apparently also a Malloryism.

I'm honestly not sure how much I would have enjoyed it on its own, without the intriguing backstory, although I do love murder mysteries that involve characters who write murder mysteries.

Currently reading

Currently reading The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, about a young woman from Bangalore who travels to Kashmir to track down a man from her mother's past in the hopes of gaining some closure after her mother's death, and instead finds herself with more questions than answers. So far, I'm liking it less than I thought I would, which is super annoying, because I spent a full month waiting for it on Libby. 

To read next

My hold on Emma Copley Eisenberg's The Third Rainbow Girl arrived! I'll pick that up on my lunch break or after work today.

Comments

[kore]

I also read that Sophie Hannah book because of the expose! It's not something I would otherwise read, lol. It was pretty amusing, knowing the backstory.

[troisoiseaux]

I'm almost 100% sure that Sophie Hannah did in fact hire a private detective to investigate Dan Mallory, because a. her denial as reported in the article was SO sketchy, and b. she included it in the novel!!

[moon_custafer]

Christie wrote a few with that plot twist; sometimes they’re satisfying and sometimes they’re not. I haven’t read Ordeal By Innocence since high school, but do recall that it fell into the “not” category for me.

Yeah, nothing dates quite as badly as psychological explanations for stuff. There are a couple of passages in Ray Bradbury stories that I think were even meant, at the time of writing, to be parodies of such things (the characters pitching them invariably turn out to be wrong)—and they’re *still* breathtakingly annoying to read.

[troisoiseaux]

I'm trying to think if I've read any others with the same twist, but if I have, I've completely forgotten. I feel like I need to make a secondary reading list to just track which Agatha Christie novels I've read!

[moon_custafer]

Aside from the sheer numbers, there’s also the complication that some were re-titled for the US publication, iirc. Maybe that was more of a Marjorie Allingham thing (I know it delighted me a few years back to encounter an Allingham fanfic that provided both a UK and an American title).

[troisoiseaux]

No, that's definitely the case for Christie's novels, too. Plus there was the whole And Then There Was None title change thing.

Just glancing at Wikipedia, I guess the e-books typically use the UK titles? Which is probably a good thing, because just glancing on Wikipedia, many of the US titles were distinctly less catchy. (For example, Three Act Tragedy became Murder in Three Acts?? Why.)

[moon_custafer]

Maybe the terms for theatrical structure differ between the countries?

That does sort of remind me of the movie adaptation of The Madness of George III being titled “The Madness of King George,” so as not to confuse US audiences who, to be fair, are less likely to see the name George and automatically think “Ah, yes, one of England’s kings,” and might therefore suppose The Madness of George III was the third installment of a “Madness of George” movie series.

[troisoiseaux]

Maybe the terms for theatrical structure differ between the countries?

I assume it has more to do with the "murder" vs. "tragedy" branding? Just to make it a little more obvious that it is a murder mystery we are dealing with, in case the "by Agatha Christie" part didn't give it away.

[osprey_archer]

I'll be interested how you feel about The Far Field when you're done! I knew the authors slightly in college, so I keep meaning to read it, but I also keep putting it off.

[troisoiseaux]

I'm... definitely appreciating it more, the more I read of it, because it is a well-written and incisive novel - not to mention super relevant, given what's been going on in Delhi over the past couple of days - but oh my GOD, the second-hand anxiety is excruciating.