Breathing Just a Little

The next five in my Agatha Christie re-read project are now down the hatch! I said when I started doing this that it would take a while, and so it is proving, but I am really enjoying the journey, and you can't say fairer than that, can you? I did a mixed bags this time - picked out three books I am very fond of, for quite varied reasons, and have already re-read a few times, so none of these plots came as a surprise, as well as two I didn't like much on first reading and haven't re-read before. I was interested to note the ways in which my reading of them is different now, with my middle-aged eyes, and the ways in which my response has remained consistent over time. Over halfway now! I'm planning to clean up all the remaining Marples and Beresfords next, then swing back to do a Poirot completion journey. Death on the Nile was among the earliest Christies I read - probably in the first five or six - and I fell madly in love with it then, and have re-read it several time...

Christie re-reads have been happening! I find them relaxing in between new books - gives my brain a rest of sorts, while still engaging me enough to be enjoyable. I'm no longer even pretending to follow any kind of order, I'm just reading to mood now :-) I'm almost at the halfway point now (27 read from a target 57), and overall, my feeling is that the books hold up very well as mysteries, somewhat well as entertainment, and are a very mixed bag in terms of cultural and social expectations and norms (some having some truly awful moments).  That said, I am feeling confirmed in my view that Christie is the Grande Dame of the Golden Age for a reason. Her vivid, clever and original plots jump off the page, and are just as twisty and fun in 2025 as they were in the 30s, 40s, 50s etc.  I am really enjoying the process, and the deep comfort it brings me to slide into old favourites when I'm tired, stressed, or otherwise over myself. It's also been great fun to discover som...

I haven't posted about my Agatha re-read project since last August, but that doesn't mean I have abandoned it! I did get very busy later last year and was also distracted by a lot of great new books, but I have been making my way through some Christie revisits, just not writing them up. Having just finished my Evil Under the Sun re-read a couple of days ago, I was prompted to do a catch up post. So here are the seven Christies I have re-read between late August and now - briefer notes than previously, but at least something! I also have been lazy and haven't bothered adding cover art, sorry :-) I haven't been attempting to keep to order in any way, just picking off the ones I felt like, but I have now exited the 1920s with the Poirot books, which is good news as (with the exception always of the amazing Roger Ackroyd), I feel the Poirot work really hits its straps in from the 1930s onwards. 1. The Big Four (Poirot, 1927) This is one of Christie's spy-thriller effort...

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...

I've slowed right down on my Christie re-read project, being busy with work, reading new books on prizelists, and my self-imposed June Month of Poetry commitment. That said, I have now made it through books 11-13, so time to post them! I don't expect 14-17 to be up in the next month though; I did think this was going to be a project extending over more than a year, and it looks like that is correct! This set is where the streams cross, and Poirot really hits stride while Marple has a less great one. Because I'm in a Hercule state of mind now, I'm going to change up my methodology and do the next four Poirots as the next set (The Big Four, The Mystery of the Blue Train, Peril at End House, and Lord Edgware Dies). After that, I'll do a Marple / Tommy and Tuppence set. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, written in 1926, is really the first Christie novel where she did something ground-breaking in terms of the way she used the form and the reveal. It's quite a difficult o...

The next three books up in my Agatha Christie re-reading project are the third books in the Poirot and Miss Marple series, and the second in the Tommy and Tuppence Beresford series. The earliest of these is the Poirot short story collection, published in 1924, followed by the Tommy and Tuppence linked short stories in 1929, with the Miss Marple novel coming more than a decade later in 1942.  With these, two of them were pretty much as I remembered (and I rated them much the same as I would have done 40 years ago), but one of them was waaaay more yikes than I had clocked at the time, to the point of being uncomfortable to read now. This is the first time in the re-read project that I've concluded that yeah, probably not going to go there again. More information below! Next up will be one of Christie's acknowledged masterpieces, the Poirot novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; the Marple novel, The Moving Finger; and the 1961 stand-alone novel, The Pale Horse. I am genuinely excited...

The next three books up in my Agatha Christie re-reading project are the second books in the Poirot and Miss Marple series, and the first in the Tommy and Tuppence Beresford series. The earliest of these is the Tommy and Tuppence, published in 1922, followed quickly by the Poirot in 1923, with the Miss Marple coming almost a decade later in 1932. There is a very strong stylistic consistency between the two books from the early 20s, which I reflect on in the individual book notes. Next up will be books 3 for Poirot and Miss Marple respectively, and book 2 for Tommy and Tuppence. Given that I fit the re-reading project in around both life commitments and new book reading, it will probably take another 3 weeks for the next batch, even though these are super fast reads (usually they take me under 3 hrs to polish off). The Murder on the Links The second novel to feature Hercule Poirot, this book is very typical of early Christie style and theme. It is narrated by Poirot's "Dr Watso...

My Agatha Christie re-reading project is underway with a bullet!  I started off with Christie's most famous and best-selling book of her career, 1939's stand-alone novel And Then There Were None, inspired by having just seen the stageplay. I then moved on to the two books that introduced her two main detectives - her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920, Hercule Poirot) and, from a decade later, Miss Marple's entree in The Murder at the Vicarage (1930).  I was fully intending to continue in an orderly fashion, but a country town secondhand bookshop we visited on weekend away was sporting a hardcover set of Christies, which included one of the few Christie books I read 40 years ago from the library but have never owned or subsequently re-read - and, delight of delights, *I couldn't remember the ending*. So of course I bought it, and Three Act Tragedy zoomed up the reading list with a bullet, despite being well down chronologically on the Poirot list :-) I h...