02.06.09
Seven Dials Mystery
So as a library employee, there’s a set of concepts floating around my brain at all times that are specific to libraries, but that I frequently end up applying to outside life. One of them is the book talk: a very short, all-positive review of a book, and should at least sound like a genuine personal recommendation. (Booktalking something you haven’t read usually involves a mixture of intense enthusiasm and careful omission of certain truths.)
The point of a booktalk is to convince the audience that they must read this book right this very second, and thus take the library’s copy out today, instead of waiting and considering and (horror or horrors) maybe just buying it at the bookstore later. Thus, there are two approaches to booktalking items you didn’t quite love: 1) avoid them in favor of books about which you can genuinly gush, or 2) lie through your teeth. Since life is just to short for crappy books, I usually go with option 1.
Which brings me to the point of this entire writing: The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie. I got the paperback to about 10 cents, in light of my plan to read all of Christie’s works eventually. (The plan may need to be revised.)
Several of the characters here are reprised from a previous novel I haven’t read, The Secret of Chimneys, and the setting is much the same as well. The story here begins with the murder of a young man named Gerry Wade, concurrent with (but unrelated to?) a prank played on him by several friends. They secretly fill the late sleeper Gerry’s room with alarm clocks, but thanks to an overdose of sleeping medicine, even that won’t be enough to wake him.
This was my least favorite Christie novel so far. I suspect it has something to do with the choice of main characters: they’re all young, and most of them very wealthy. There are girls with ridiculous knicknames like Bundle and Socks (does anyone know if these sort of things were normal in 1920s Britian?), and on the whole everyone acts quite silly and spoilt.
I was also less than impressed with the plot. There are numerous complications, but nothing that feels like a real twist, and the solution to the mystery comes rather out of left field. I had initially blamed my own inability to see the solution, but according to the (actually cited!) quote on Wikipedia from a newspaper review, I wasn’t the only one who thought the story didn’t lead sensibly to the solution.
The same article quotes Christie’s autobiography on this title. She says this sort of “light hearted” books doesn’t require much plotting or planning. I would disagree; while this book may not have been given such careful consideration in writing, a good mystery does in fact require it.
Life is too short for bad books! Unless you have a drive to complete the author’s oeuvre, or have already read Chimneys (and actually liked Bundle and Bill? okay…), I’d recommend passing on this one.
02.05.09
Something what rose from the dead
So, new year, new beginnings.
Along with some clear-eyed reflection on the previous year: to wit, my writing style and this format were not working out well together. I dearly love picking literature apart, and while I enjoyed everything I wrote during the first half of last year, I realize now they were all too long in the writing and far far too long in the reading.
So, a new plan emerges: about one book a week (which is all the faster I can read them), with a maximum word count in mind. Film and music reviews as time allows.
I also created a plan for reading this year: an equal number of “junk food” books (mostly in the form of paperback mysteries), literary novels, and non-fiction. There will be a break in the routine over the summer to work on my remedial education in childhood classics.
A secondary goal is to write something worth bragging about, and then brag the hell out of it. While I enjoy the process of sorting out my thoughts about a book, I’d like even better to have a chance to discuss books with more than one other person. Which I’m 99% sure is the current readership total ’round here.
So, after a few posts to catch up on what I’ve read so far in 2009, you’ll see one book each week, discussion strongly encouraged.
07.10.08
Two-for-one Special on Non-Fiction
Both of these books are rather short and badly overdue, so rather than attempt any real analysis, I’m caving to the big internet stereotype and going the “zero attention span” route. Two books in about 200 words apiece, go!
Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America: a food memoir
by Lind Furiya
The Devil in Dover: An Insider’s Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America
by Lauri Lebo
06.27.08
Book-a-month Challenge: June
Leave Myself Behind
by Bart Yates
When your job includes both ordering new books and weeding old ones, and you’re paying any attention at all, you learn something not everybody realizes: you can’t force your tastes on your patrons. Or use fiction selection to foist your political or social views on them. We had a long-ago manager who just refused to believe this, and felt you could change people by force of will.
Which leaves me, now, at a library with about 50% minority patrons, and maybe 40% religious patrons, weeding books about gay white men by the truckload.* And while the purchasing seems to have been indiscriminate (short story collections full of poorly written “erotica” abound, along with bubble-headed chick lit in drag) I’ve tried to sort out real literature from the crap.
Which is where Leave Myself Behind comes in.
06.17.08
Book-a-Month Challenge: May
The Serpent’s Tale
by Ariana Franklin
May’s theme was, of course, mothers. I decided to stretch the idea a bit: while the main character’s relationship with her child is an important feature in the book, it’s by no means the central element.
This one is a sequel to the author’s first novel, Mistress of the Art of Death. There have been a few small changes to the cast: Gyltha’s grandson Ulf is away at school, and Adelia has a little one of her own, named Allie. In the year and some since the close of the previous book, Adelia has set up practice with Mansur (times being what they were, they pretend he is the doctor and she the assistant) among the tiny villages in the far countryside. Adelia is happy staying far away from the people of wealth and power with whom she dealt in the previous book, not only for her own sake to avoid the suspicions people had of a learned woman, but for the safety of her child and former love: Allie’s father, Rowley Picot, also happens to be a bishop.
06.02.08
Book-a-Month Challenge: April
Miss Leavitt’s Stars: the Untold Story of the Woman who Discovered how to Measure the Universe
by George Johnson
Yes, I know, I’m grossly behind on these things. That’s because I keep picking books for the themes that I don’t end up actually liking. Thus, procrastination city.
This month’s theme was beauty, so I read about the most remote and lovely of worlds: the distant stars.
This particular book features an interesting paradox: as it’s non-fiction, the title gives you a pretty clear picture of the material covered, but in reality Henrietta Swan Leavitt isn’t the subject of the book. The introduction states that this book was originally meant to be a collective biography of astronomical discovery in the early 20th century, but that Leavitt’s story was too interesting to ignore. Read the rest of this entry »
05.30.08
Guilty Secret #1: Criminology
Famous Crimes Revisited: from Sacco-Vanzetti to O.J. Simpson
by Dr. Henry Lee & Dr. Jerry Labriola
Okay, I confess: I read way too much true crime as a teenager. I loved the gruesome details even more than I loved the science and psychology. Now that I look back as an adult, I realize part of the appeal was in reading about a more orderly version of the real world, where the monsters were captured and punished.
Of course, life as a grownup shows the world to be considerably more complicated than that. So while I’m no longer a fan of the lurid-crime-details style of Ann Rule and assorted copycats, I enjoy memoirs and reflections by forensic scientists; I feel more confident in humanity knowing that there are people taking a logical look at the most chaotic parts of life.
05.16.08
Dispatches from the “Weird YA” Shelf
Tangerine
by Edward Bloor
Edward Bloor is one of the most unusual authors I’ve ever read. More goes on under the surface of the story that in other YA novels (heck, more than many adult novels too), but it never feels like he’s going out of his way to try and be clever. No puns, no codes, no dreadful allegorical naming; the story just is what it is. The narrators of these tales are more than capable of showing the reader around the strange world where they reside, equally easy and matter-of-fact about matters from the quotidian to the surreal. Read the rest of this entry »
04.20.08
Premise, execution, and balance thereof
The Children of Men
by P.D. James
If you haven’t guessed it yet, I’ll come right out and say it now: I’m a book snob. I generally end up liking the book better than the film, and I go to great lengths to make sure I read the book first wherever possible. So, people keep recommending this to me, and I’ve enjoyed other things by the same author – and on a particularly shriek-filled afternoon on the desk at work, a world without children seemed like the perfect lunch break reading.
