troisoiseaux

Read Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie and - ironically, for a book about deja vu - could not figure out whether or not I'd read this one before. (Confusing things further was that it turns out to be one of the at least three Christie novels to feature an apparently senile elderly woman in a nursing home who talks about a child buried behind a fireplace! Fascinating implications for my Agatha Christie Extended Universe theory, because either Marple, Poirot, and Tommy and Tuppence do in fact all exist in the same universe and have encountered the same woman, or they don't, but this specific scenario is a constant across multiple universes; equally fascinating on a Doylist level, because— what???) ANYWAY. This was a fun one: the spoiler-free version is that a young couple reconstructs a twenty-year-old murder that hits close to home, literally. ( Spoilers )

Read two different mysteries that featured bodies in the gymnasium of an all-girls school: Agatha Christie's Cat Among the Pigeons (1959) and Josephine Tey's Miss Pym Disposes (1947). Otherwise completely different books— the Christie is one of her Poirot books, but arguably the story's real detective is the plucky teenage daughter of a former spy, and features more international intrigue and missing jewels than "murder mystery at an all-girls school" would suggest. The Tey is sort of an anti-detective novel— the titular Miss Pym, a visiting lecturer on psychology at a women's physical training college when tragedy strikes, not only stumbles across her clues by accident but has a tendency to absently pick them up and stick them in her pocket, miss their significance, or actively suppress their existence; you get the sense that a mystery narrative is doing its best to coalesce around her and she's trying equally hard to slither out of it.

I enjoyed both, but I suspect that Tey's will stick in my head for longer: among other reasons, because I love (as a literary dynamic) a good unhealthily intense, codependent friendship, and hoo boy does this deliver. ( Read more... )

I have a number of books currently in progress, but the one worth mentioning now is The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett; skygiants piqued my interest by comparing Peter Wimsey-as-Harlequin in Murder Must Advertise to Dunnett's Francis Crawford of Lymond. I'm always a sucker for charming rogues roped into geopolitical intrigue - see Megan Whalen Turner, Scott Lynch, and Lynn Flewelling - but Lymond is probably the most... intense... version of this trope I've encountered. So far, it's unclear what his motivations are, which has me feeling like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop— the reader is supposed to root for him, right??? It's called the Lymond Chronicles, so one would assume, but he's just set his family castle on fire with his mother and sister-in-law inside and generally appears to be working against both the Scottish and English, so I feel like I'm missing something. I'm really liking this book, though!

Dracula Daily finally got me hooked into the story enough that I was too impatient to wait for the updates, so now I'm just reading Dracula.

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.

( Spoilers )

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.

Recently read

Went on an Agatha Christie binge, with The Pale Horse (1961), The Moving Finger (1942), and Towards Zero (1944). Interestingly, despite the very different premises and the almost 20-year gap between their publishing dates, I caught a number of similarities between The Pale Horse and the The Moving Finger.

( Read more... )

Read Intimations, a new, very short, very good collection of essays by Zadie Smith, reflecting on the hell year that is 2020. The proceeds are donated to the Equal Justice Initiative and the COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund for New York— it's $4.99 for an e-book and I think it's $10 for a physical copy?

Finished The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman. I have basically no thoughts on it whatsoever, but ( the ending was cuckoo bananas. )

Currently reading

Given my recent Arthurian kick, I'm re-reading The Once & Future King by T.H. White.

Recently read

Read The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie, which was very different from the manor house (or train, cruise ship, bridge table, etc.) murder plots of most of her books, following a chilling series of seemingly unrelated murders of victims with alliterative names, linked by anonymous letters to Hercule Poirot claiming responsibility and an ABC train guide left at the scene of each crime. I did guess the twist - ( spoiler! ) - but not whodunit.

Read Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh, which I did not enjoy. It had an intriguing premise - an elderly widow living in the woods attempts to armchair-detective a murder that may or may not have actually happened - but the novel was weird and unpleasant and nothing got resolved except ( spoilers )

Read Caroline Fraser's Prairie Fires, a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder (and by extension, her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane) recommended by evelyn_b. It was really interesting in terms of the truth of Wilder's childhood vs. the carefully-crafted version of it she depicted in her novels, and the broader historical context of her life and the release of her books and the impact they had, but reading about Wilder's complicated personal and professional relationship with her daughter felt genuinely awkward, like being invited to a dinner party by an acquaintance only to witness a blowout family argument.

Currently reading

Just started Daniel Brook's The Accident of Color, which so far has focused on mixed-race communities in New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina, before and during the Civil War.

Recently read

I retract what I said last week about not liking The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, with the disclaimer that this is a change of opinion mostly in retrospect. Like, the more I think about it, the more impressed I am by the story the author wanted to tell and how she told it - especially as an all-too-relevant reflection on political and religious tensions in India - but I found it super stressful to actually read. The main character's privilege and naivety made her a ticking time bomb in the other characters' lives and she had no idea, but the narrative did, and made sure you knew it, too. 

Read The Third Rainbow Girl: the Long life of a Double Murder in Appalachia by Emma Copley Eisenberg, which is - as it says on the tin - a true crime book about the 1980 murder of two young women who had hitchhiked from Arizona to West Virginia to attend a sort of annual hippie convention called the Rainbow Gathering. At the same time, it's also about the history of West Virginia and how it - and Appalachia in general - has been perceived by the rest of the U.S., and a memoir of Eisenberg's own experiences living in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, where the murders took place. It's not a typical true crime narrative, but I found that to be a positive rather than a negative thing.

Read a couple more Agatha Christie novels:

Elephants Can Remember was interesting to read immediately after The Third Rainbow Girl, since both focused/touched on the fallibility of memories and the narratives we construct to make sense of the senseless. It had the rather unusual premise of being a murder mystery novel in which no one seems particularly interested in solving the murder in question, which was not as annoying as it sounds. It does eventually get solved, of course - after much but should we really go digging up the past?-ing - and I actually figured out who the murderer was like halfway through, which NEVER happens! It was also the third novel of hers I've read in a row to feature adoption, and specifically, unsympathetic characterizations of adoptive mothers. (Too controlling and/or needy in their relationship with adopted children, who almost all reject them as "not their real mom"/hate being adopted, etc.) I'm not sure if this was a broader cultural stereotype of the 1950s-70s, or just the particular hill Christie decided she was going to die on? Either way, it's a super weird opinion to encounter now. 

The other one, Dumb Witness, was a good old-fashioned manor house murder mystery, and very fun to read. Poirot is clearly having a great time going "undercover" to interrogate the various players in this particular drama; Hastings is just super pumped he gets to pet a dog. 

Currently reading

I'm halfway through Oval by Elvia Wilk, which I am SUPER into, and would have made a good back-to-back companion read with Jenny Offill's Weather.

I'm also, like, a chapter and a half into Code Girls by Liza Mundy, a non-fiction book about American women who worked as codebreakers during WWII.

To read next

Hopefully The Cutting Season by Attica Locke - Libby says it should be available "in the next few days," which could mean anything, tbh - but after that, I think I should detox from stories about murder for a bit??

Recently read

Mrs. McGinty's Dead, by Agatha Christie, is one of those novels where you get the feeling that the author had as much fun writing it as you're having reading it. It features Poirot at his funny, fussy best and the always delightful Ariadne Oliver, some great supporting characters, and a mystery that kept me guessing until the murderer was revealed to be the one character I hadn't even thought of suspecting, without it feeling like a bait-and-switch. I actually had caught one of the biggest clues - a seemingly throwaway line whose phrasing made me pause, like, huh, that's kind of a weird thing to say - but didn't follow it to its (in retrospect) logical conclusion, and totally missed its significance.

Weather by Jenny Offill crams quite a lot of plot into such a brief book, but the short version is that a university librarian with a young son and a tendency to act as an armchair therapist to everyone in her life, from her recovering-addict brother to the guy at her go-to bodega, takes a job answering emails for a former mentor who now hosts a popular podcast about climate change, and goes through (to borrow a phrase from the Cut) "the Five Stages of Climatic Grief: ignorance, disbelief, worry, heightened worry," and an obsession with doomsday preppers. Although maybe "a lot of plot" is not quite accurate: there's a lot of plot threads, but the novel itself is more atmospheric than active, told in stream-of-consciousness fragments interspersed with non-sequitors and email Q&As; specific scenes, as such there are, feel less like watching a film than flipping through a not-quite-fluid sequence of photographs. With its backdrop of climate change and the 2016 election, it is very much a novel Of The Present Moment, but less obnoxiously so than some others I've read.

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews was so, so good and completely devastating, especially since it seems to be based, in part, on her own life.* The novel focuses on two sisters, Elfrieda and Yolandi, who grew up in a relatively unorthodox family in an otherwise conservative Mennonite community in Manitoba. Now in their forties, Elf is a celebrated concert pianist who suffers from severe depression and has attempted suicide more than once; Yoli is a struggling writer and twice-divorced mother of two, who will do anything to keep her sister alive.

( Thoughts, w/ spoilers )

Last but not least, I finally finished The Trials of the King of Hampshire, by Elizabeth Foyster! What a bizarre, sad, complicated story.

Currently reading

Currently reading Teju Cole's Every Day Is for the Thief, about a young man returning to Lagos, Nigeria after fifteen years in the U.S. Everything I can find online says it's fiction, but it reads so much like a memoir - something about the ratio of anecdote to exposition in the first-person vignettes that make up the novel, and the photographs scattered throughout - that I keep looking it up again, like, but are you sure?

To read next

I have incoming holds on The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay and The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia by Emma Copley Eisenberg, so whichever one I get my hands on first.

Recently read

I finally got my hands on Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, the …memoir? …advice book? by My Favorite Murder co-hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark! Surprisingly, given the title – and the selling point of ‘hey, your favorite true crime/comedy podcast hosts have written a book!’ – there’s not a lot of discussion of murder. (Probably a good thing— their storytelling style of enthusing with friends over a mutual interest meets book report started the night before it was due probably wouldn’t hold up well as a published book on true crime cases.) The premise is more: here’s how we fucked up, and here’s some other stuff that fucked us up, and here’s what we learned/how to deal with it. I’m glad I read it... but glad I waited for two months to read it on Libby instead of paying actual money for it.

Another long-awaited Libby hold I read this week was Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway, which is, to quote NPR, “a wonderfully unpredictable multi-generational saga which revolves around a Massachusetts bowling alley.” With this premise, I wasn’t expecting the amount of deeply bizarre misfortune that struck the Truitt-Sprague family, including ( spoilers )

Despite all that, McCracken keeps the tone light, with a breezy, whimsical narrative style. She also has a habit of dropping hints about her characters’ futures – who marries who, who dies how – that, at least in the latter case, are both purposefully misleading and exactly what it says on the tin, so when it finally happens, it’s satisfying as both the ‘ah-ha!’ moment of a prophesy fulfilled and a plot twist for the distinctly weirder than you originally assumed. The other books I thought of most while reading this one were Boy, Snow, Bird (interracial family in early 20th century Massachusetts; secret/misrepresented identities/pasts) and The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock (middle-aged romance; the thing that makes a family’s fortune bringing misfortune.)

Finished a couple of Agatha Christie novels— The Body in the Library and Five Little Pigs. I’d always assumed that Ariadne Oliver was a fictional stand-in for Christie herself, but apparently she does in fact exist in the same universe as Miss Marple! In The Body in the Library, a little boy shows off his detective-story credentials by mentioning he’d gotten autographs from a number of detective novelists, including Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. (Wait, does Miss Marple exist in the same universe as Hercule Poirot? What detective fiction is Agatha Christie writing in her Marple-and-Poirot ’verse if not, well, Marple and Poirot?)

Finally, I read Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay. It was - to call water wet and the sky blue - incredibly dark. I really liked it, though; especially how the environment was not so much a background detail/local flavor as a thread of the story in itself. Instead of being framed as man vs. nature, it was like, nature vs. ‘ha, who are we kidding, there is no contest here, nature existed before the actions of man and it will continue on for long after.’

( Thoughts. )

Currently reading

Vanity Fair update: I’m once again fully sympathetic to Becky; at this point, she’s basically trying to network her way into high society, and networking is the worst. Meanwhile, Amelia’s storyline has gone full Georges Pontmercy, as she’s been forced to give up custody of her son to his wealthy, horrible grandfather and strict spinster aunt, who hate her.

Next on list

I’m nearing the top of the waiting list for Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans on Libby! I’ve also heard good things about Trick Mirror, the new book of essays by New Yorker writer Jia Toletino, but my library doesn’t appear to have either a physical or digital copy available yet.

Recently read

Tried to Agatha Christie myself out of my reading slump with Cards on the Table and Crooked House— she's my go-to author for when I want to read something and I’m not terribly picky about what it is, or if I’m being too picky and need a kind of mental reboot. Her books may be predictable – in form, if not in the actual ‘whodunit?’ sense; I am completely terrible at figuring out who the murderer is, mostly because I’m cheerfully gullible about all the red herrings – but at least that means they’re predictably enjoyable! Plus, there are so many that I can always find one I haven’t read yet, while, again, always being reasonably certain about what I’m going to find inside.

I particularly liked Cards on the Table because of the added twist to its locked-room murder plot – every person in the room was there because they'd previously committed murder, so everyone had not just a motive but the guts to do the crime – and because of Christie’s self-caricature in the form of Ariadne Oliver, a detective novelist who helps Poirot solve the murder. I can really only think of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Harriet Vane as another example, but I love when mystery novels have a character that is a mystery author in order to make jokes about mystery novels as a genre and how hard it is to write them.

Crooked House did break with form a little. Although it had all the prerequisite plot points – and, coincidentally, a red herring recycled from Cards on the Table (or visa-versa?) – it didn’t feature any of Christie's usual detectives, and instead was handed over to Scotland Yard and the earnest amateur sleuthing of the narrator, a semi-objective observer of a fatal family drama. I actually did guess the murderer, mostly because I recognized the twist from another, modern mystery thriller recently turned into a TV show (which I haven’t actually read or seen but like, I spend time on the internet, so cultural osmosis happened) and then I un-guessed it precisely for that same reason. :P

Recently watched

Keeping to the apparent theme of the week, I watched Agatha and the Truth of Murder, which is loosely - very, very loosely - inspired by two real-life unsolved mysteries: the 10-day disappearance of Agatha Christie in 1926, and the 1920 murder of Florence Nightingale Shore.

Christie, while struggling with her writing and marriage, is approached by Shore’s partner, Mabel, who has spent the last six years trying to solve her girlfriend's murder. They concoct an elaborate plan to find the killer by luring the suspects to a secluded country estate under the guise of receiving an inheritance from a long-lost relative, with Christie going undercover as a solicitor’s secretary to interrogate them all. The rest of the movie is spent by various characters in discussing how Real Crimes Aren’t Like Detective Stories, while around them, the plot ticks the boxes of, like, every classic murder mystery trope.

This was a fun movie! Super cheesy, but I wasn’t expecting an Oscar-worthy performance in the first place. I got to see Arthur Conan Doyle give Agatha Christie snarky writing advice; everything else was just frosting.