Reading post
Apr. 30th, 2026 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterOne, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie: On a routine trip to the dentist, legendary private detective Monsieur Poirot becomes embroiled in a case of apparent suicide that looks increasingly suspicious as the bodies of other patients from that day's appointments start to pile up. This is a clever, twisty, wryly funny mystery on par with everything you'd expect from Christie; my Poirot reading has been sporadic and out of order, but he's such a vivid character that it only took a few pages before he felt like the very best of fictional acquaintances. I find it impressive in general how much Christie manages to do with so few words. Her prose is very neat and precise, with minimal but to-the-point descriptions and long passages of untagged dialogue that are nonetheless easy as anything to track. She lures you through the story at a brisk walking place - pleasant, exhilarating, but not exhausting - and then ends it all with a solution to the puzzle that you could never have guessed (well, I couldn't, anyway) but feel like you should have guessed for how well it brings together all the clues.
Carefully avoiding any spoilers, I will just say that I really liked the pairing of crime-thriller-worthy events with the utterly prosaic setting of a dentist's office, and then also, paired with that, Poirot's nobly naive insistence on the value of ordinary human life in the face of grand ideologies. IDK, it was all just so nice, for a story with so many corpses in it. Our girl Agatha was perfecting the cosy mystery long before the genre was a twinkle in the zeitgeist's eye.
H. P. Lovecraft: I have never attempted Lovecraft before, but I came in abundantly forewarned of his 1) breathtaking racism and 2) rather unlovely prose. The latter I mitigated somewhat by listening to this first handful of stories in audio format, with a good narrator to make up for the lifelessness; the latter can't be helped. I enjoyed myself, anyway!
The story that made most impression on me was The Shadow over Innsmouth, which is aboutthe evils of miscegenation a rundown port city in Massachusetts whose inhabitants, having taken up the worship of eldritch gods to ensure good fishing hauls, are gradually transforming into strange and horrible fish-people themselves. The narrator is a student who visits the town, asks too many questions, and finds himself in trouble with the locals. The worldbuilding is magnificently creepy and the chase scene is absolutely thrilling. I particularly liked how viscerally Lovecraft described his horrors: everything is choking stenches, diseased-looking bodies, and inexplicable waves of overwhelming revulsion at the sight of all things connected to the fish-people.
A few years ago, before I had really read much that was even Lovecraft-adjacent, a couple of my siblings confused me very much by playing this song (spoilers!) at Christmas instead of the more familiar version. I get the joke now, yay! Also, three guesses what has kept getting stuck in my head ever since I finished the novella.
I also listened to The Call of Cthulhu and The Hound, both of which had very enjoyable eldritch horror vibes and served as a satisfying introduction to the Cthulhu mythos that until now I've known only through osmosis, but neither of which left me brimming with things to say or even any particular desire to try and summarise what happened. I will say that while The Call of Cthulhu is the more famous work and more centrally relevant to Lovecraft's universe, I enjoyed The Hound more; the main characters were horrible grave-robbing edgelords, and I guess I just liked them better as people than the ivory tower crew in the other one, lol.
Confessions by Augustine of Hippo, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin: And now for something completely different! I've been plugging away at this all month, and it has been an experience. Augustine (St. Augustine in the saint-having traditions) is a 4th century church father, theologian, philosopher and priest from Roman Africa. He was from a mixed-faith family and his mother attempted to raise him Christian, but in his twenties he fell in with the Manichaeans (a dualist religion incorporating elements of Christianity as well as other faiths). Augustine was fiercely intelligent, passionately interested in philosophy and rhetoric, and never fully satisfied by the Manichaean doctrines; it took him a decade of uncertainty and questioning, but eventually, at age 32, he embraced Christianity wholeheartedly after being taught an allegorical approach to reading scripture that resolved all his objections to the faith.
That journey - from sorta-kinda Christian kid to sorta-kinda Manichaean to anguished doubter to passionate baptised believer - takes up the first two thirds of the book, which are simply put some of the most beautiful, exquisitely emotional writings about God I've ever read. I think modern liberal Christians of my sort, and perhaps even the more firmly planted fundamentalists, can struggle to fully understand the mindset of the ancient devout. Augustine's faith was not a set of beliefs in the way we tend to conceive of faith now; it was a matter of vivid, concrete reality with immediate existential import. Augustine lived from cradle to grave in the absolute certain knowledge that the grass was green, that day followed night, and that human affairs were governed by a higher power; his inability to arrive at a solid, 100% philosophically and scientifically consistent understanding of who/what that higher power was and how it operated put him in danger. I remember the early days of the COVID pandemic, when we knew that something bad was happening but no one seemed to know how bad it would be or whether it would harm us personally, how best to prevent it or when, if ever, a vaccine might arrive; that's the closest I can come in my own catalogue of past experiences to the kind of anxiety Augustine describes. Instead of a respiratory virus, the imminent threat was eternal damnation. And none of Augustine's pagan neighbours were masking.
So like I said, that was two thirds of the book, a beautiful mix of theology and deeply personal memoir as Augustine reflects on his actions and psychological state during various phases of his life, then identifies the ways in which God was already working on him without his knowledge. I was enthralled the whole way through. I'm glad he put all that good stuff first, because if he had started from the other direction - if, before subjecting his audience to an immersive account of all his theological errors, he had chosen first to ground them with his reckoning as to how things actually work - I don't think I would have made it past the first page. As it was, I largely skimmed the last few chapters, which were mostly made up of mindbogglingly dense and pedantic philosophical treatises on subjects such as the workings of human memory and the word-by-word cosmological implications of the first sentence of the book of Genesis. I guess I'm just not ready for that in my spiritual journey.
I did tune back in for Augustine's examination of his remaining post-conversion sins. Now, Augustine is the theologian who first brought us the doctrine of original sin, as well as being perhaps one of the greatest and most effective champions of the "Don't have sex or you WILL getchlamydia God's eternal wrath and DIE" school of Christian thought; even knowing all that in advance, I was taken aback by how strict his views are on the inherent sinfulness of bodily pleasure. Augustine laments the biological impossibility of abstaining altogether from food, since even when eating strictly for sustenance, sating your hunger can't help feeling good, which is terrible; he reports with approval how his mother's nursemaid used to prohibit her growing charges from drinking water outside of mealtimes, lest the pleasure of slaking their thirst prove a slippery slope leading to alcoholism and from alcoholism straight to Hell. He scrutinises with great suspicion his own fondness for church hymns: it's all well and good if he enjoys them for the truth and purity of their lyrics, but if he ever catches himself enjoying the actual music they're set to, he will know that he has fallen into grave error. He upbraids himself for being the kind of worldly fool who sometimes allows the sight of an interesting spider or lizard to momentarily distract him from the solemn contemplation of God that he feels to be quite literally the only proper use of his time. Thank fuck there were no smartphones in Augustine's day. I shudder to think what he would have to say about Candy Crush.
In conclusion, as both a Christian and a onetime classicist, I found this a very worthwhile read; I can't speak to how it might land if you are neither (or even just only one) of those things, but I'm glad I took the time, and it's easy to see why Augustine is one of the few early Christian writers whose works have truly gone the distance.
Carefully avoiding any spoilers, I will just say that I really liked the pairing of crime-thriller-worthy events with the utterly prosaic setting of a dentist's office, and then also, paired with that, Poirot's nobly naive insistence on the value of ordinary human life in the face of grand ideologies. IDK, it was all just so nice, for a story with so many corpses in it. Our girl Agatha was perfecting the cosy mystery long before the genre was a twinkle in the zeitgeist's eye.
H. P. Lovecraft: I have never attempted Lovecraft before, but I came in abundantly forewarned of his 1) breathtaking racism and 2) rather unlovely prose. The latter I mitigated somewhat by listening to this first handful of stories in audio format, with a good narrator to make up for the lifelessness; the latter can't be helped. I enjoyed myself, anyway!
The story that made most impression on me was The Shadow over Innsmouth, which is about
A few years ago, before I had really read much that was even Lovecraft-adjacent, a couple of my siblings confused me very much by playing this song (spoilers!) at Christmas instead of the more familiar version. I get the joke now, yay! Also, three guesses what has kept getting stuck in my head ever since I finished the novella.
I also listened to The Call of Cthulhu and The Hound, both of which had very enjoyable eldritch horror vibes and served as a satisfying introduction to the Cthulhu mythos that until now I've known only through osmosis, but neither of which left me brimming with things to say or even any particular desire to try and summarise what happened. I will say that while The Call of Cthulhu is the more famous work and more centrally relevant to Lovecraft's universe, I enjoyed The Hound more; the main characters were horrible grave-robbing edgelords, and I guess I just liked them better as people than the ivory tower crew in the other one, lol.
Confessions by Augustine of Hippo, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin: And now for something completely different! I've been plugging away at this all month, and it has been an experience. Augustine (St. Augustine in the saint-having traditions) is a 4th century church father, theologian, philosopher and priest from Roman Africa. He was from a mixed-faith family and his mother attempted to raise him Christian, but in his twenties he fell in with the Manichaeans (a dualist religion incorporating elements of Christianity as well as other faiths). Augustine was fiercely intelligent, passionately interested in philosophy and rhetoric, and never fully satisfied by the Manichaean doctrines; it took him a decade of uncertainty and questioning, but eventually, at age 32, he embraced Christianity wholeheartedly after being taught an allegorical approach to reading scripture that resolved all his objections to the faith.
That journey - from sorta-kinda Christian kid to sorta-kinda Manichaean to anguished doubter to passionate baptised believer - takes up the first two thirds of the book, which are simply put some of the most beautiful, exquisitely emotional writings about God I've ever read. I think modern liberal Christians of my sort, and perhaps even the more firmly planted fundamentalists, can struggle to fully understand the mindset of the ancient devout. Augustine's faith was not a set of beliefs in the way we tend to conceive of faith now; it was a matter of vivid, concrete reality with immediate existential import. Augustine lived from cradle to grave in the absolute certain knowledge that the grass was green, that day followed night, and that human affairs were governed by a higher power; his inability to arrive at a solid, 100% philosophically and scientifically consistent understanding of who/what that higher power was and how it operated put him in danger. I remember the early days of the COVID pandemic, when we knew that something bad was happening but no one seemed to know how bad it would be or whether it would harm us personally, how best to prevent it or when, if ever, a vaccine might arrive; that's the closest I can come in my own catalogue of past experiences to the kind of anxiety Augustine describes. Instead of a respiratory virus, the imminent threat was eternal damnation. And none of Augustine's pagan neighbours were masking.
So like I said, that was two thirds of the book, a beautiful mix of theology and deeply personal memoir as Augustine reflects on his actions and psychological state during various phases of his life, then identifies the ways in which God was already working on him without his knowledge. I was enthralled the whole way through. I'm glad he put all that good stuff first, because if he had started from the other direction - if, before subjecting his audience to an immersive account of all his theological errors, he had chosen first to ground them with his reckoning as to how things actually work - I don't think I would have made it past the first page. As it was, I largely skimmed the last few chapters, which were mostly made up of mindbogglingly dense and pedantic philosophical treatises on subjects such as the workings of human memory and the word-by-word cosmological implications of the first sentence of the book of Genesis. I guess I'm just not ready for that in my spiritual journey.
I did tune back in for Augustine's examination of his remaining post-conversion sins. Now, Augustine is the theologian who first brought us the doctrine of original sin, as well as being perhaps one of the greatest and most effective champions of the "Don't have sex or you WILL get
In conclusion, as both a Christian and a onetime classicist, I found this a very worthwhile read; I can't speak to how it might land if you are neither (or even just only one) of those things, but I'm glad I took the time, and it's easy to see why Augustine is one of the few early Christian writers whose works have truly gone the distance.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-30 01:01 pm (UTC)