This was a perfect book to spend time with while staying in bed with a nasty head cold: entertaining, fast-paced, insanely readable, deftly mixing froth and humour with heavier subjects like bullying, domestic abuse and single parenthood. My view of the novel is inevitably coloured by the excellent HBO mini-series, which I watched first, so I can’t help but compare. “The book is better” is a very routine remark about onscreen adaptations, but in this case I thought that both versions had their particular strengths and weaknesses.
Tag: fiction
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin – Book Review
I read this remarkable landmark sci-fi novel all over again immediately after I finished it, which is exceedingly rare for me. I simply wasn’t satisfied with my first reading, which happened in short bursts separated by long periods of time; this is a kind of richly detailed and imaginative book that’s best appreciated by immersing yourself into it for a while.
Science fiction is a perfect medium for exploring “what if” scenarios, and the thought experiment in The Left Hand of Darkness goes like this: what would a human society look like if people had no fixed gender, and male/female dualism didn’t exist?
The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie – Book Review
An earlier Miss Marple murder mystery, this clever and engaging novel is, in Christie’s own words, a variation on an old classic scenario in detective fiction.
The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce – Book Review
I’ve never read anything by Rachel Joyce before, but I was hoping this book would be an easy breezy summer read, just as its cover seemed to promise. Unfortunately, it turned out to be one of those books that are neither terrible enough to drop, nor engaging enough to really stick with. Instead of days, I spent a few weeks reluctantly picking it up, hoping that maybe it would get better (not really). As a lover of music, I really dug the premise, but this is no High Fidelity.
4.50 From Paddington by Agatha Christie – Book Review
4.50 From Paddington probably sits squarely in the middle of Christie’s Miss Marple series – not a classic, but hardly one of the worst either.
Black Rock White City by A. S. Patrić – Book Review
I’m a sort of reader who doesn’t like to give up on books easily, but this latest book club read, an acclaimed debut novel from a Serbian-born Australian writer, really tested my patience for a good hundred pages before I finally started to find it somewhat rewarding.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie – Book Review
This classic Poirot murder mystery always hovers near the top whenever a discussion of Christie’s greatest novels arises, rightly so. Along with a handful of later books, it made her name and displayed her particular genius for a simple yet daring concept, and an ending that yanks the carpet from under the unsuspecting reader’s feet.
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout – Book Review
Books are like cities. Some you only ever need to visit once and you absorb all they have to offer in one go, while others you could re-visit over and over, getting lost in its alleys and passageways and noticing new things every time. This book, not quite a traditional novel but more like a novel in short stories, about the community in a small coastal town in Maine, is so rich in detail and insight I can see myself picking it up from the book shelf a few times over.
Endless Night by Agatha Christie – Book Review
Though Christie wrote a great many standalone crime novels, Endless Night feels like a true departure, different to everything else she wrote before or since. It’s not a classic detective story with classic detective tropes, there is barely any criminal investigation and the crime itself happens almost three-quarters into the story. Back when I first read it as a teenager my reaction was ambivalent, but even then this eerie novel imprinted on my brain as much as the haunting passage from William Blake’s poem it takes its name from. Revisiting it now has cemented Endless Night as one of my Christie favourites.
Crooked House by Agatha Christie – Book Review
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