![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyI went out for lunch one day this week with my mother, her friend Colleen and Colleen's daughter. Colleen told us a story about an elderly couple she used to know who used to have one pair of false teeth between them. "So they'd go out to a café and one would have a bite then they'd take the teeth out and hand them over to the other one." The waitress handing our menus out snorted with laughter.
August books read
* Our House - Louise Candlish (2018) ★ ★ ★
I was about a quarter of the way into this when I realised there was something familiar about the style of it, and that's when I found that I'd read and not enjoyed a book by this author a few years ago. This one is better, but it still outstays its welcome by at least a hundred pages.
It begins when a woman called Fi arrives home one afternoon to find a strange family moving into her house and her husband missing. Interspersed with this, we get Fi's version of events via the transcript of a true crime podcast interview and her husband's story via a long-winded letter. It's all quite unlikely, but I liked the (apparently controversial) ending.
* Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light - Caroline Eden (2018) ★ ★ ★
What an odd book: a history, a travel guide, a history of travel guides, with occasional recipes thrown in. It's a series of essays more than an ongoing travelogue, following the coast of the Black Sea from Odessa to Istanbul to Trabzon. It's a beautiful book, as an object and as a piece of writing, and I want to try some of the recipes. It's also a confusing book: the photos aren't captioned and the recipes aren't indexed and I never got a real sense of the writer.
* Rex v. Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders - Laura Thompson (2018) ★ ★
What a frustrating book. This is an examination of the execution of Edith Thompson in 1922, after being (dubiously) charged with and convicted of murdering her husband. And there's a lot to examine: Edith was a clever, charming woman with a good job and an unhappy marriage, who wrote fantastical letters to her lover in which she alludes to poisoning her husband... which caused all sorts of problems when her younger lover stabbed her husband and their joint murder charge led to frenzied coverage of the trial.
The problem with the book is in the telling: jumping back and forward chronologically, repeating anecdotes, repeating phrases (Edith "grasped the numinous" several times, and the book includes the word "irruption" more times than I've read it in my entire life). And after all that, I still don't really understand the crime at all: what really happened on the night of the stabbing, what Freddy (the lover) thought he was doing, how much of Edith's letters were really true. (Having said that, I do agree with the hypothesis of the book, which is that the murder conviction was unwarranted and the execution a miscarriage of justice.)
* Crooked House - Agatha Christie (1949) ★ ★ ★ ★
This standalone mystery about a patriarch murdered by one of his dysfunctional family was one of Christie's own personal favourites, according to the introduction. For me, this is a re-read inspired by Laura Thompson's Rex v. Edith Thompson, which flags this book as one inspired by that scandalous murder trial, twenty-five years after it happened. So that was my frame of reference this time round: one of the characters, an actor, is staging a play about Thompson, which would have alerted the contemporary reader to some business with a cache of love letters that echoes real-life events. That all went over my head the first time I read it (without affecting my enjoyment of the story), so knowing about it added an extra layer of interest this time round.
* The Doctor's Wife is Dead - Andrew Tierney (2017) ★ ★ ★
This is a workmanlike telling of an absolutely gobsmacking murder trial in Ireland in 1849. I finished this with a lot of questions unanswered.
* The Double Clue - Agatha Christie (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
A recently put together collection of Hercule Poirot (plus Japp and Hastings) short stories. Good, quick fun.
August books read
* Our House - Louise Candlish (2018) ★ ★ ★
I was about a quarter of the way into this when I realised there was something familiar about the style of it, and that's when I found that I'd read and not enjoyed a book by this author a few years ago. This one is better, but it still outstays its welcome by at least a hundred pages.
It begins when a woman called Fi arrives home one afternoon to find a strange family moving into her house and her husband missing. Interspersed with this, we get Fi's version of events via the transcript of a true crime podcast interview and her husband's story via a long-winded letter. It's all quite unlikely, but I liked the (apparently controversial) ending.
* Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light - Caroline Eden (2018) ★ ★ ★
What an odd book: a history, a travel guide, a history of travel guides, with occasional recipes thrown in. It's a series of essays more than an ongoing travelogue, following the coast of the Black Sea from Odessa to Istanbul to Trabzon. It's a beautiful book, as an object and as a piece of writing, and I want to try some of the recipes. It's also a confusing book: the photos aren't captioned and the recipes aren't indexed and I never got a real sense of the writer.
* Rex v. Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders - Laura Thompson (2018) ★ ★
What a frustrating book. This is an examination of the execution of Edith Thompson in 1922, after being (dubiously) charged with and convicted of murdering her husband. And there's a lot to examine: Edith was a clever, charming woman with a good job and an unhappy marriage, who wrote fantastical letters to her lover in which she alludes to poisoning her husband... which caused all sorts of problems when her younger lover stabbed her husband and their joint murder charge led to frenzied coverage of the trial.
The problem with the book is in the telling: jumping back and forward chronologically, repeating anecdotes, repeating phrases (Edith "grasped the numinous" several times, and the book includes the word "irruption" more times than I've read it in my entire life). And after all that, I still don't really understand the crime at all: what really happened on the night of the stabbing, what Freddy (the lover) thought he was doing, how much of Edith's letters were really true. (Having said that, I do agree with the hypothesis of the book, which is that the murder conviction was unwarranted and the execution a miscarriage of justice.)
* Crooked House - Agatha Christie (1949) ★ ★ ★ ★
This standalone mystery about a patriarch murdered by one of his dysfunctional family was one of Christie's own personal favourites, according to the introduction. For me, this is a re-read inspired by Laura Thompson's Rex v. Edith Thompson, which flags this book as one inspired by that scandalous murder trial, twenty-five years after it happened. So that was my frame of reference this time round: one of the characters, an actor, is staging a play about Thompson, which would have alerted the contemporary reader to some business with a cache of love letters that echoes real-life events. That all went over my head the first time I read it (without affecting my enjoyment of the story), so knowing about it added an extra layer of interest this time round.
* The Doctor's Wife is Dead - Andrew Tierney (2017) ★ ★ ★
This is a workmanlike telling of an absolutely gobsmacking murder trial in Ireland in 1849. I finished this with a lot of questions unanswered.
* The Double Clue - Agatha Christie (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
A recently put together collection of Hercule Poirot (plus Japp and Hastings) short stories. Good, quick fun.