Tag Archives: Agatha Christie

Month 11 of my Reading Challenge By Frances Colville

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I found it hard to decide what to go for first this month and spent a happy hour browsing my bookshelves.  In the end I chose The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson (Hodder & Stoughton paperback 2014).  Set in a debtor’s prison in 18th C  London, this is in places a grim read and the plot fell short of being 100% convincing, but the author is good on atmosphere, the main character is engaging and the book is a good choice for anyone who likes historical crime fiction.

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I had no idea what to expect when I began my next book A Little Life by American writer Hanya Yanagihara, knowing nothing at all about it other than it had been shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker.  But it hooked me in right from the first page.  What’s it about?  Friendship, identity, working out who you are and what your life is all about, pain, abuse, relationships, death, grief and love.  It’s challenging, harrowing and absolutely compelling.  And of all the books I’ve read so far this year, this is the one I would recommend most.  Currently available in hardback – published Picador – or on Kindle.

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What do you choose when you’ve just finished a brilliant book; one which has taken you a long time to read and which you can’t get out of your head?  For me, the solution is to turn to something familiar and reliable and completely different.  And as followers of this year of book reviews will know, that means in my case an Agatha Christie.  This time I picked up The Moving Finger – one of a batch I was given last Christmas.  I don’t think I’ve read it before though it’s hard to be sure.  Either way, I couldn’t remember the ending.  And of course neither the book itself nor the ending disappointed. Vintage Christie – and very enjoyable at that.  My copy is a Fontana paperback, reprinted 1971.

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This Little World edited by Sue Ashby is the sort of book you can dip in and out of whenever you have ten minutes to spare  It’s a collection of short stories from people who live in Dorset – some as young as 11 – and each story is located in Dorset.  Lots of variety and lots to interest anyone who knows anything about Dorset.  My personal favourite is A Smuggler’s Life by 12 year old Sam.  Available now on Amazon and will soon be published as an e-anthology.

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And I’ve also been dipping in and out this month of my copy of the works of poet George Herbert edited by W H Auden.  I studied Herbert for A level and there are certain lines from certain of his poems which still stick in my mind.  Writing in the first half of the 17th C his poems are all about religion, his understanding of it and his struggle to be worthy, but it isn’t the content of the poems which speaks to me but the beauty of the language and the strength of his belief.  Not I think a well-known or in any way fashionable poet but one who in my opinion deserves to be read more.  My edition is a Penguin paperback published 1973.

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Only one month left to go.  And so many books to choose from………………..

 

 

Month 9 of my Reading Challenge By Frances Colville

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My first two books this month both dealt with hugely important issues.  I Do Not Sleep by Judy Finnigan   focuses on grief and in particular coming to terms with the death of a child, while the main theme of Love You Better by Natalie K Martin is domestic violence.  Both were interesting reads, but neither wowed me.  The storyline in I Do Not Sleep struck me as unrealistic and contrived, and I didn’t feel any real empathy with the main character.  The book was somewhat redeemed by its ending, so it’s worth persevering.  Love You  Better felt like a missed opportunity and the ending was obvious throughout which detracted from my involvement with the progress of the story.

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Next I turned to another of the books on my Agatha Christie pile – on my mind no doubt because of visiting Agatha Christie’s former holiday home, Greenway, in Devon last month.  This one The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was one I picked up at last year’s Cheltenham Literary Festival and  I was swiftly transported back to Agatha Christie world with all its preconceptions and prejudices.  You always get what you expect with an Agatha Christie – and there are times when nothing else will do.  This one didn’t disappoint.

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All of which reminded me of a new Agatha Christie story.  Sophie Hannah (whose psychological thrillers I also enjoy) has with the approval of the Agatha Christie family written The Monogram Murders featuring Hercule Poirot, arguably Christie’s most famous character.  I wondered if anyone else could effectively recreate Poirot and his world – and my answer having read and enjoyed The Monogram Murders is a slightly confused yes and no.  Hercule Poirot is well recreated and the storyline is as intriguing and enjoyable as any other Poirot mystery.  And yet I would never mistake this for an original Agatha Christie.  Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be.  Perhaps Sophie Hannah intended all along for this to be an updated, twenty-first century version. To me it did indeed feel more like one of her own psychological thrillers with a cast of Agatha Christie characters rather than a mystery of the type Christie herself wrote.  The confusing thing is that I don’t mind that at all.  As I’ve said before I enjoy reading both books by Sophie Hannah and books by Agatha Christie.  So a fusion of the two was always going to work for me.

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Rosanna Ley is the author of The Saffron Trail which is partly set in my local town of Bridport and the neighbouring town of Lyme Regis –  a fact which added to my enjoyment as I ticked off all the places I recognise and love.  The story also takes us to Cornwall, Morocco and the US and the descriptions of all these places is done very well.  It’s a good story too with believable and likeable characters.  This is the first  book by this author I have read, but I will certainly look out for another.

So it turns out (by chance rather than design) that all the books I’ve read this month have been books telling stories – and I’ve enjoyed them all to a greater or lesser extent.  They have provided relaxing and pleasant entertainment.  But entertainment isn’t the only reason I read; I also want to be educated, stimulated and challenged.  So now I find myself wanting a book which meets at least one, and preferably more of those criteria.  The only question is: what will it be?

October 2015

 

 

My Reading Challenge by Frances Colville

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How many books can you read in a year?  It recently occurred to me that life is far too short to read everything I want to read.  There simply aren’t enough hours in the day or years in a lifetime.  So I’ve set myself a challenge for 2015 – to be organised about what I read, to make deliberate choices and above all to emphasis variety.  But there has to be quality there too.  I haven’t any time to waste.

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So here’s the pick of the books I’ve read in January.  First up were two Agatha Christie novels. The first, Ordeal by Innocence was a re-read and the second, Death in the Clouds, new to me.  I thoroughly enjoyed both.  For me Agatha Christie is a master craftsman, able to weave together the intricate threads of a plot in remarkably few words, and at the same time create a view of her world with all its idiosyncrasies.  Agatha Christie paperbacks are readily available in secondhand bookshops.

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Next I moved on to Stoner by John Williams (First published 1965, Vintage classic reprint 2012).  Another brilliantly crafted book and a beautifully written one, it tells the story of William Stoner, an American academic, who seems to stumble through life with a sense of not being quite sure what he is actually doing there.   I was hooked from the first page although it’s hard to analyse why.  Perhaps it’s just simply enough to say I recognised him.  I would like to have known him.

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And then something completely different; a memoir entitled Love, Nina written by Nina Stibbe (Penguin paperback 2014) telling the story of the time she spent as a nanny for a family in London in the 1980s.  This well written and very humorous book particularly resonated with me as I too worked as a nanny for a London family in my gap year.  Nina Stibbe has a delightfully light and self-deprecating voice and a casual way of dropping big names (Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller for example) into her writing, adding both depth and interest.  I see she has also written a novel and I look forward to checking that out – though maybe not this year.

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My final book this month was Margaret Forster’s Good Wives?  (Vintage paperback 2002) With a mixture of biographical writing, and personal reflection, Forster tells the story of three ‘good wives’ from different times (Mary Livingstone,  Fanny Stevenson and  Jennie Lee) and tries to work out just what it is that makes a good wife.  It’s an interesting premise for a book, and generally a good  read, though it suffers from being neither biography nor memoir, falling somewhere between the two.  Perhaps inevitably I am left feeling dissatisfied and wanting to know more – about the people whose stories she tells and about her.

 

So I end the month by adding yet more books to my list – further biographies of the three ladies, and re-reads of Margaret Forster’s novels.  Not quite what I’d originally planned.

 

 

 

Poirot Halloween Special Preview {TV}

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Halloween’s as much about guilty little treats as it is about undead souls. This Halloweens treat is a special episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Possibly the most dark and sinister Poirot yet starts out with a children’s Halloween party complete with witches, eerie music, jack o lanterns, fire a haunting game of snap dragon and of course a death. Add into the mix a cast of suspicious characters and an un co-operative police officer in a rural setting and you tada, one classic who dunnit.

Award winning actress Zoë Wanamaker makes a welcome return, alongside David Suchet, as Ariadne Oliver in Hallowe’en Party.

Adapted by actor, screenwriter and novelist, Mark Gatiss, Hallowe’en Party also stars Amelia Bullmore, Deborah Findlay , Georgia King, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Sophie Thompson, Paul Thornley, Eric Sykes, Fenella Woolgar and Timothy West.

When Ariadne Oliver attends a children’s Hallow e’en party in Woodleigh Common with her friend Judith, a young girl boasts of having witnessed a murder years before. Later that evening, the girl, Joyce Reynolds is found dead, drowned in an apple-bobbing bucket in the library. It appears that any one of the guests could have slipped out in the dark during a game of Snapdragon and murdered her.

At the request of Ariadne, Hercule Poirot arrives at Woodleigh Common to investigate the murder. Though Joyce was dismissed as a fantasist, Poirot is convinced her story has some truth to it. When he seeks out the local gossip, he discovers that there have been a number of suspicious deaths in the village in recent years which Joyce could have witnessed. But while Poirot pieces together the facts, another child is found murdered. Could a forged codicil, a missing au pair and a secret love affair be the key to solving the crime?

Watch the Poirot Halloween Special in ITV1 at 8pm on Wednesday 27th October.