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Reading post
Apr. 30th, 2026 07:41 pmOne, 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!
( Three novellas/short stories )
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.
( Cut for length )
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!
( Three novellas/short stories )
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.
( Cut for length )
