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lgpiper

Reading Slothfully

I was told in elementary school that I only could read at half the speed for success in college. Oh well, one benefit of slow reading is you get to live with the characters a longer period of time. I read in a vain attempt to better understand people. At my other homes, I'm known as a spouse, pop, guy in the choir, physical chemist, computer/web dilettante and child-care provider. In theory, I'm a published author, if you consider stuff like Quenching Cross Sections for Electronic Energy Transfer Reactions Between Metastable Argon Atoms and Noble Gases and Small Molecules to count as publications. I've strewn dozens of such fascinating things to the winds.

Currently reading

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
Jules Verne
The Spirit of the Border
Zane Grey
Ramona the Brave (Ramona, #3)
Beverly Cleary
The Underground Man (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Ross Macdonald
Delilah of the Snows
Harold Bindloss
Mrs. Miniver
Jan Struther
Betsy-Tacy Treasury (P.S.)
Maud Hart Lovelace
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
The Way Some People Die
Ross Macdonald
Envy of Angels
Matt Wallace

The Secret Adversary

The Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie This was the first of the Tommy and Tuppence books. It's pretty weak. It reads like a Hardy Boys book, full of adventure, danger, and oodles of implausibility. The characters do things rational people wouldn't do. I dunno, it was sort of cute in a way, but I expect something better plotted and written from Christie than I do from the pseudo Franklin W. Dixon. It probably deserves more than 2 stars, but it was so amateurishly done that I'm downgrading it.

This wasn't one of those typical drawing room mysteries, where baffling stuff happens and then all the suspects are gathered at the end for a discourse of the case and a fingering of the killer, usually accompanied by some hints that the rest of the suspects have skeletons in their closets. Nope, it's more of a spy thriller, but think spy thriller written for adolescent boys, except without all the gratuitous blood shed and with spunky young women.

I dunno, the more I think of it, the more I wonder how Christie got to be so famous. I love Poirot videos, but as much for the art deco settings as the stories, such as they are.