Not Much of a Murder Monday
Oct. 10th, 2016 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bArchived from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
I've just finished Murder on the Links for the second time, and it's just as bafflingly dull as it was the first time. I'm not at all sure why: it's got plenty of twists; there's an unofficial Detective Competition, Poirot is Poirot and Hastings is an idiot. There's no shortage of alarming discrepancies, dark secrets, and layer after layer of people shielding one another from justice. But I lost more time dozing off in the middle of chapters than actually reading.
No such complaint about The Mysterious Affair at Styles – it's just as energetic and suspenseful as Links is inexplicably boring.
Is it the pacing? Is it France? I don't know what happened with Links. Hastings acquires a girlfriend and she's pretty likable, though what she sees in Hastings is never made clear (he is a decent chap who enjoys a good breakfast and has Opinions About Women).
What I'm Reading Now
The Man in the Brown Suit begins unpromisingly with spies, but continues DELIGHTFULLY with a young first-person narrator, Anne “Anne the Adventuress” Beddingfeld, whose late father was “one of England's greatest living authorities on Primitive Man” and who finds herself, shortly after his death, alone in the world save for information pertaining to a suspicious subway accident and just enough money for a passage to South Africa. Some sort of shenanigans are building aboard the ship, but what? I hope it's not spies.
David Liss' A Conspiracy of Paper is narrated by its main character, Benjamin Weaver, a Jewish ex-boxer and persuader-of-all-trades in eighteenth-century London. So far it's mostly a research delivery system, but not a bad one. Weaver does a lot of rough things in this rough city, and his matter-of-fact narration (with occasional supplementary digression on why he prefers not to hit women) can be both awkward and disconcerting, but he has my attention.
What I Plan to Read Next
Poirot Investigates and Watson's Choice, followed by some books I bought at the Friends of the Library book sale.
What I've Finished Reading
I've just finished Murder on the Links for the second time, and it's just as bafflingly dull as it was the first time. I'm not at all sure why: it's got plenty of twists; there's an unofficial Detective Competition, Poirot is Poirot and Hastings is an idiot. There's no shortage of alarming discrepancies, dark secrets, and layer after layer of people shielding one another from justice. But I lost more time dozing off in the middle of chapters than actually reading.
No such complaint about The Mysterious Affair at Styles – it's just as energetic and suspenseful as Links is inexplicably boring.
Is it the pacing? Is it France? I don't know what happened with Links. Hastings acquires a girlfriend and she's pretty likable, though what she sees in Hastings is never made clear (he is a decent chap who enjoys a good breakfast and has Opinions About Women).
What I'm Reading Now
The Man in the Brown Suit begins unpromisingly with spies, but continues DELIGHTFULLY with a young first-person narrator, Anne “Anne the Adventuress” Beddingfeld, whose late father was “one of England's greatest living authorities on Primitive Man” and who finds herself, shortly after his death, alone in the world save for information pertaining to a suspicious subway accident and just enough money for a passage to South Africa. Some sort of shenanigans are building aboard the ship, but what? I hope it's not spies.
David Liss' A Conspiracy of Paper is narrated by its main character, Benjamin Weaver, a Jewish ex-boxer and persuader-of-all-trades in eighteenth-century London. So far it's mostly a research delivery system, but not a bad one. Weaver does a lot of rough things in this rough city, and his matter-of-fact narration (with occasional supplementary digression on why he prefers not to hit women) can be both awkward and disconcerting, but he has my attention.
What I Plan to Read Next
Poirot Investigates and Watson's Choice, followed by some books I bought at the Friends of the Library book sale.
