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Agatha Christie Re-Reading Project #5: Books 14-16

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Despite evidence to the contrary, I have not abandoned my Agatha Christie re-read project! Life, and other reading challenges such as reading to prizelists, have somewhat derailed me, but I am still turning back to this one when the inclination urges.  This time, I decided I needed a palate cleanser after whipping through the first five books on the Booker Prize longlist and finding all but one of them underwhelming, and starting into books 6 and 7 only to feel myself flagging straight away. Rather than plunging ahead with that list, I gave myself a quiet Sunday and a few pre-bed reading evenings to instead indulge in a Christie re-read, and I AM NOT SORRY :-) I have completely broken with my in-order plan now and am embracing the chaos of just reading the ones I feel like reading, which, this time, was two early-ish Poirots (Peril at End House from 1932 and The ABC Murders from 1936) and a much later Miss Marple, A Caribbean Mystery, from 1964. On the whole, I thought one of the t...
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Book Reviews: Booker Prize Longlist #3 and #4

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Back with another Booker longlist post! These are the two shortest on the list, explaining why I knocked them over quickly. I am currently listening to the audiobook of The South, which, at the 30% mark, I'm not overly pumped about (but I'll press on, it can be my exercise and driving audio for a few days). After that, I have three more sizeable books to tackle - Flashlight, which is a chonker, and The Land in Winter and Endling, which are both mid (standard) length novels. I'll probably post the next pair of reviews next week sometime, depending how fast I progress. I'm already predicting that the three books I won't get to before shortlist announcement in September are the Adam book, which is proving tough to locate; the Szalay book, because I don't like the premise (it seems to be some kind of reverse Lolita); and the Desai (well, I definitely won't get to that one, as it's not even released until two days after the shortlist). Here is the list with r...
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Book Reviews: Booker Prizer Longlist Books #1 and #2

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I'm having a tilt at the Booker Prize longlist this year, with a goal to read all 13 novels before the shortlist announcement on 23 September. I most likely won't get there, but if you don't try... I jumped out the gate quickly with these two, but expect things to slow down a bit now as work is pretty busy. (Listening to the second one on audiobook definitely helped, as it was my chores / exercise / driving companion!) Here is the list. I'll highlight the ones I have read in each post as I go. 1. Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Albanian) 2. Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (British) 3. Flesh by David Szalay (Canadian) 4. Endling by Maria Reva (Ukrainian / Canadian) 5. The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (British) 6. The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (American / British) 7. Audition by Katie Kitamura (American) 8. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Indian / British) 9. Flashlight by Susan Choi (American) 10. One Boat by Jonathan Buckley (British) 11. Uni...
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On the menopause of whales

(This is a weird form poem, almost but not quite a prose poem, inspired by the ground-breaking theoretical work being done by my close friend Emily, who is a rising star in the literary and cultural theory world and who I am enormously proud of). On the menopause of whales  did you know, she said, that some whales go through the menopause too? orcas and so on, the ones with teeth. only humans and toothed whales and chimps, that's all, and I said no, no I didn't know that, I didn't know that any other species stuttered and faltered and plunged into the twilight the way we do the way I am doing with a body that tries and tries to bleed every month but only sometimes, only fewer times than sometimes, succeeds with a mind and a heart and many sets of pyjamas drenched with a misery that has no name and has many names  my daughter says they learned in biology that menopause is a rare and strange evolution, counter-intuitive and seemingly aberrant, because breeding from first matu...
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Book reviews: Three random books

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I have been sadly neglecting this blog, and I'm aware of it! I intend to get back into semi-regular posting soon, and I thought the best way to kick off was with a triple book review :-) It's been another hectic month between surgical recovery, work, and family stuff, but I have squeezed in four more new books since the three life-writing texts I reviewed back on 13 July. Here's a review of three of them. None were tough reads, which helps! Also none were stinkers, but neither were they perfect books. There were a lot of things I really liked about this book. The atmospheric portrayal of humanity's last years, the complex and nuanced unpacking of what true artificial intelligence in an embodied form might be like, and the exploration of the darker shades of human entitlement were all on point, and executed very well. The premise of the book is a future world that is very literally dying, or perhaps more accurately, becoming unsurvivable for humans. Into this world, huma...
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The second quarter of 2025: Midwinter report

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The second quarter of the year, for me, runs from Easter until the middle of the winter school holidays (ie this very week). I realise my division of the year does not align to anything particularly, but it's just how it is in my brain! This has been a very busy, very tiring, but ultimately pretty good quarter.  I've been mostly well in an infectious sense - only one cold virus to report - although my digestive woes from my borked gallbladder were on a steady rise through the months. Thankfully, I had the surgery to remove the offending organ 2 weeks ago and am now about 80% recovered from the wounds (it has taken longer than I had hoped), with some digestive improvement already. In other health news, I have also finally entered the perimenopause, so I'm still working out what that means for me (both physically and mentally / emotionally). I've been very busy, you might say over-busy, with work - some big new projects have been claiming a lot of time - but the work has,...
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Book Reviews: Three life writing texts

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I have recently read three very different books that can all be described as "life writing". One is an old-school "straight" biography, that tracks its subject from birth to death in a linear fashion; one is a memoir which is primarily focused on a particular formative experience / period in the writer's life; and the third is a combination social commentary / non-fiction told through the lens of the writer's relationship with her grandson and the sport he plays.  I don't often read life writing - I'm much more of a fiction person - so finishing three in July was a definite aberration for me (to be fair, I have been slowly picking away at the biography since February, but I did complete it this month). For that reason, I thought a comparative three-way review might be a good thing to do! I enjoyed all three texts in entirely different ways, with one stand-out that I would describe as exceptional. Each gave me room for thought about what makes truly g...
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