Technical nonfiction and spec fiction. She/her. Melbourne, Australia. Generation X. Admin of Outside of a Dog. BDFL of Hometown (Mastodon) instance Old Mermaid Town (@futzle@old.mermaid.town). Avatar image is of a book that my dog tried to put on their inside.
My rating scale: ★ = I didn't care for it and probably didn't finish it; ★★ = It didn't inspire but I might have finished it anyway; ★★★ = It was fine; ★★★★ = I enjoyed it; ★★★★★ = I couldn't put it down.
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In Agatha Christie’s classic, A Pocket Full of Rye, the bizarre death of a financial …
Content warning Spoilers Agatha Christie’s A Pocket Full of Rye
Finally Miss Marple turns up in chapter 13!
In Agatha Christie’s classic, A Pocket Full of Rye, the bizarre death of a financial …
Content warning Mild spoilers: A Pocket Full of Rye
Chapter 9 of 28 and still no sign of Miss Marple!
E-book exclusive extras:1) Christie biographer Charles Osborne's essay on The Mirror Crack'd from Side to …
Content warning Whodunit spoilers - Agatha Christie - The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side
Till now I'd only read Christie in the form of Poirot stories in an enclosed setting: Murder on the Orient Express where the train is snowed in; Death on the Nile where everyone is stuck on a boat. This one is set in Miss Marple's town of St. Mary Mead, so people could, and do, come and go. I was actually surprised at how little screen time Miss Marple herself actually gets. The biggest part probably goes to Marple's nephew, Chief Inspector Craddock.
The big spoiler for this story is that the victim signs her own death warrant by admitting that she transmitted a German measles infection to a pregnant woman, resulting in the child having permanent physical and intellectual problems, and the mother having lifelong PTSD from that.
Fortunately Rubella is a thing of the past and people don't go around spreading disease because they're afraid of missing out on an opportunity to socialize.
The story snowballs alarmingly as further characters are killed off because they Knew Too Much, right up to the last chapter when there is another unexpected death, and we are left wondering if that one was suicide or also murder, or if the distinction even matters after everything that happened.
This book might have benefited from a bit of a trim at the start and a bit of fluffing up in the middle as the events happened which led to the additional consequential murders. But it was altogether a pretty painless read and the (rushed) conclusion satisfying.
In Agatha Christie’s classic, A Pocket Full of Rye, the bizarre death of a financial …
Number two of four in the Marple omnibus.
E-book exclusive extras:1) Christie biographer Charles Osborne's essay on The Mirror Crack'd from Side to …
Pretty good, but pacing problems marred the last third. Onto the next one in the omnibus!
E-book exclusive extras:1) Christie biographer Charles Osborne's essay on The Mirror Crack'd from Side to …
The first in a bound compendium of four Miss Marple novels.
What is the true origin of the phrase 'one fell swoop'? Does the word 'honeymoon' …
Every entry in this book about folk etymology follows the same format: “Here’s this word or phrase. People say it originates with this far-fetched etymology, but they’re wrong, it’s actually this mundane etymology.”
I certainly learned a lot of trivia tidbits from this book, but I couldn’t consume more than a few per day before they got monotonous.
What is the true origin of the phrase 'one fell swoop'? Does the word 'honeymoon' …
This is the kind of book that needs to be dipped into for short reads. To consume the thing top-to-tail is a pretty big undertaking.
Recommended by Zatty after we were talking about Watership Down.
What is the true origin of the phrase 'one fell swoop'? Does the word 'honeymoon' …
It's weird that the title of this book is exactly one of the folk etymologies that the author is keen to dispel. I guess it's what sells.
What is the true origin of the phrase 'one fell swoop'? Does the word 'honeymoon' …
From the tsundoku pile.
Back cover description - Raoul Smythe wanted nothing more than to be left alone with …
I shouldn’t expect too much from a first-time author under the Del Rey label, but Shade & Shadow feels like two stories—one about magic research, one about the murder—smushed together. The former wasn’t really hashed out properly, and the latter was acceptable but with some poorly chosen red herrings.
Picked five stories in this collection, published in the 1970s and 1980s. Bounced off two of them. Annoyed at Bear’s depiction of women in two more of them—one featured negative portrayals of sex work and one simply had no women in it. I can get better stories than these.
A collection of short stories by Bear from the 1980s. I’ve been bouncing off 1980s sf lately because of its pervasive cishet maleness, so let’s see how far I get.
