Book 17: Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

Another Christie mystery! This is the first one I've read after already seeing an adaptation of it. I watched the 2022 movie version of it, enjoyed it, and also immediately wondered how much of it differed from the book. The answer: a fair amount, but very little of the central mystery. 

This particular mystery is essentially a travelogue, which make it both extremely fun and also sometimes painful to read because it was written by a British woman in the 1930s who doesn't merely think that imperialism is good, she also wouldn't (or at least doesn't appear to in this book) even consider imperialism to be something that needed to be defended. The British Empire is simply a fact of the world, and one that's uncontroversial and unchallenged. So that makes her descriptions of Egypt and the people who live and work there to be the definition of casually racist, and her presentation of the various suspects and their lives can be uncomfortable at times for similar reasons. However, with that rather strong caveat noted, I still did have a nice time reading it, not least because thinking about adaptation is something I enjoy and there were a number elements to consider from that standpoint. I might recommend the movie instead, though, either the 2022 version or the 1978 one, which is apparently much more faithful to the original story. 

Grade: B

Book 16: Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie

My second Christie mystery! And my first Poirot, to boot. I confess that I read this one next because it had Christmas in the title and that is enough for me!! But I was rewarded for my Christmas obsession with a classic country house Christmas murder of a family patriarch, with a house full of family members who all have good reasons to want him dead. 

One of the fun parts of reading Christie well after seeing and reading a fair amount of media that is directly inspired by it is recognizing the source. Knives Out owes such an obvious debt to Christie, and it's just neat to be able to see what it's riffing on, and also how it's commenting on it. I don't know if Rian Johnson was a fan of this book in particular, but I would be very surprised if he hadn't read it. If I have a complaint about this book it's that it's not all that Christmas-y in feel, but the set up and murder itself is a lot of fun and the answer did evade me, even though it was all staring me right in the face. A lovely read for late spring when the weather turns cold again for one final (hopefully) freeze. 

Grade: B

Book 15: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

I am starting my Christie murder mystery read! I watched the recent adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, which I went into unspoiled, and it made me want to read and watch her other very famous works before I managed to learn too much! 

I began with this one, because while I didn't know the particulars or the 'solution,' I had a general sort of cultural osmosis about this story. I knew that it began with ten people isolated together, and that one by one they began dying. However, it turns out the setting and overall setup adds a lot! Ten people who are mostly strangers, alone together in a house on a small island off the southern coast of England, with checkered pasts to say the least. 

Mystery novels have never been my genre, but I have to say that reading this made me really understand the appeal. It was extremely nice to be able to read a book in one sitting that gave me all of the intrigue that I could want, and also provided the answer. I don't read books with the aim of figuring out the secret, and even if I had tried I don't think I could have figured it all out, but I did really enjoy how well it all fit together in the end. It's not a perfect book -- it has all of the class and race issues you might expect from a book written by an Englishwoman in the 1930s, with some casual antisemitism that caught me a bit off-guard right off the bat -- but I still really enjoyed it. 

Grade: B 

Book 14: Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

Well, I clearly needed a change of pace in my reading, and this is definitely a lighter book than what I've been reading recently! It's a book club book, and for once I've managed to finish it well before we're meeting. This is partly because the entire story is told through Slack conversations in various channels of a PR firm, which makes it an extremely quick read. It centers on Gerard, who one day discovers that he has somehow become disconnected from his physical body and now only exists in Slack.

Luckily (?) for him, he's still able to do his job fully remotely, and since he no longer needs sleep or can do anything else, his productivity has skyrocketed. He's helped by Pradeep, one of his co-workers, who helps keep his body alive while he's stuck in Slack, and the slackbot, who shows him how to explore all of the channels and is generally quite helpful and also slightly creepy. It is a fun exploration of how communication happens online and I really enjoyed it.

Grade: B   

Book 13: Out of Office by Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel

Boy, this book. I'm not entirely sure what I expected from this book exactly, beyond it being an overview of how "working from home" worked before the pandemic and how it works now as we enter the third year of the pandemic and how it could work in the future. And to its great credit, it's not a book that attempts to argue that employees are the ones who can and should be "optimizing" how remote work functions for white collar office workers; it's very clear about the fact that issues with remote work are systemic and institution based rather than on the backs of individuals, and therefore organizations and policymakers have the power to change how they work. But being focused on that source of responsibility also made it a deeply depressing read for me at the moment. It's not intended to be; they describe their view of the future of work as being cautiously hopeful, precisely because so many industries are in flux at the moment and that can be fertile ground for change. But the book's historical overview of how the concept of work (and office work specifically) has changed over the past century in the U.S. was so upsetting and it made me feel like what even is the point of any of this, all jobs suck. Which I definitely understand is more of a reflection of my own state of mind about work rather than a rational reflection on what work of any kind may look like in a year or five years or ten. However, it definitely also pointed out a fundamental flaw with how I want to engage with nonfiction at the moment: I want ways to fix intractable problems but I also want to be able to believe those fixes are possible and aren't just wishful thinking called "self-empowerment." And those kinds of solutions feel like they're in short supply at the moment! None of which is the book's fault, but also I don't know if I'm actually able to read these kinds of books at the moment the way they should be read.  

Grade: A