troisoiseaux (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
troisoiseaux) wrote2020-08-26 09:54 am
troisoiseaux) wrote2020-08-26 09:54 am
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Reading Wednesday: the Catch-up Edition
Recently read
I managed to squeeze in Agatha Christie's The Hollow before school started, and I think it's my new favorite of hers; at the very least, it stands out among her work.
In some ways, it was a reverse Murder on the Orient Express situation: only one person committed the murder, but everyone else in the house was helping her cover it up. Also like Murder on the Orient Express, I immediately wanted to re-read it to see what clues I missed.
The other thing that stood out was that we got to see into her characters' heads more than in other books, and in particular, that a few of those characters read as neuroatypical. A few weeks ago,moon_custafer pointed out that Lady Angkatell reads as having ADHD, and I'd argue that another character, Gerda, reads as having anxiety. Both characters are written in a vivid, sympathetic way; Christie expresses their thought processes - Lady Angkatell's mental leaps from A to Z, Gerda's internal feedback loop about whether to go with option A or B until she eventually she worries herself out of having any choice at all - in terms of how it makes sense to them internally (and thus to the reader) if not externally to other characters.
Also read The Tent by Margaret Atwood, a collection of what Wikipedia describes as "fictional essays" and "mini-fictions"— wisps of stories, anywhere between a couple of paragraphs to a couple of pages long. For me, the most memorable were her rewrites of Greek myths and other stories: Helen of Troy and Salome as girls with ambitions and personalities too big for their small towns; Horatio, doomed to immortality by his promise to tell Hamlet's story; the Penelopiad-esque musings of Procne.
Currently reading
Still working on Agatha Christie's autobiography! I'm definitely enjoying it, but it's been slower going than I expected— due, if anything, to a lack of paragraph breaks. It's frequently just one big block of text for pages on end, which is not the relaxation from academic reading I need, no matter how interesting the actual content.
I managed to squeeze in Agatha Christie's The Hollow before school started, and I think it's my new favorite of hers; at the very least, it stands out among her work.
In some ways, it was a reverse Murder on the Orient Express situation: only one person committed the murder, but everyone else in the house was helping her cover it up. Also like Murder on the Orient Express, I immediately wanted to re-read it to see what clues I missed.
The other thing that stood out was that we got to see into her characters' heads more than in other books, and in particular, that a few of those characters read as neuroatypical. A few weeks ago,
moon_custafer pointed out that Lady Angkatell reads as having ADHD, and I'd argue that another character, Gerda, reads as having anxiety. Both characters are written in a vivid, sympathetic way; Christie expresses their thought processes - Lady Angkatell's mental leaps from A to Z, Gerda's internal feedback loop about whether to go with option A or B until she eventually she worries herself out of having any choice at all - in terms of how it makes sense to them internally (and thus to the reader) if not externally to other characters.Also read The Tent by Margaret Atwood, a collection of what Wikipedia describes as "fictional essays" and "mini-fictions"— wisps of stories, anywhere between a couple of paragraphs to a couple of pages long. For me, the most memorable were her rewrites of Greek myths and other stories: Helen of Troy and Salome as girls with ambitions and personalities too big for their small towns; Horatio, doomed to immortality by his promise to tell Hamlet's story; the Penelopiad-esque musings of Procne.
Currently reading
Still working on Agatha Christie's autobiography! I'm definitely enjoying it, but it's been slower going than I expected— due, if anything, to a lack of paragraph breaks. It's frequently just one big block of text for pages on end, which is not the relaxation from academic reading I need, no matter how interesting the actual content.