Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

And Hell Followed

The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie

by Leave a Comment

Amazon’s coming out with an adaptation of The Pale Horse this month and I realized when I looked at a synopsis that I hadn’t read the book, so I decided to amend that ahead of watching the series. Going in, I knew there’d probably be major changes made for the TV show, and now that I have read it, I’m certain of it. To be blunt, this is bottom-tier Christie and a puzzling choice for adaptation. The plot is transparent and thin, with a creaky […]

Short story review dump (Part II)

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Little Man by Michael Cunningham

Escape from New York by Zadie Smith

Alan Bean Plus Four by Tom Hanks

Miss Marple Tells a Story by Agatha Christie

Accident by Agatha Christie

by Leave a Comment

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (5 stars) Published in 1892, The Yellow Wallpaper tells the story of a woman, the narrator, suffering from depression. The treatment imposed on her by her husband is bed rest, and she is largely confined to a room with Yellow Wallpaper. Instead of easing her turmoil, deeper psychological issues manifest, and she is eventually driven mad by the confinement. This is an utterly haunting depiction of mental illness compounded by a deeply patriarchal society that sought to protect […]

An old favorite

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

by Leave a Comment

I read all of Agatha Christie’s books in the years of elementary through high school. Hercule Poirot heavily influenced my idea of what a Frenchman should be, and I read all of his lines in my head through the filter of my French teacher in 5th grade (Miss Marple sounds like my grandmother, but stuffier, in my head). I haven’t picked up one of her mysteries for at least twenty years but my daughter has recently started to be interested in mysteries so I was […]

A whole lot of Christie short stories

The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Three Blind Mice and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

by 3 Comments

Recently, my husband went away for work for a few days, and I treated myself to a puzzle and took full advantage of my Scribd subscription. After a while, I wanted a break from fantasy and also wanted something that didn’t involve too much thinking, so I returned to one of my old comfort reads: Agatha Christie. I’ve read and re-read most of the novels, so now I turned to her short stories collections. Some of them I had read before, some I recognized from […]

Agatha Christie’s ugly, beautiful, unimportant, and interesting truths

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

by 2 Comments

While I’ve read quite a number of detective novels and murder mysteries, I realized in the past year that the work of the “Queens of Crime” (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh) was a significant gap in my knowledge, with the exception of Dorothy Sayers–even though I’ve watched almost every available episode of David Suchet’s Poirot productions. (Those adaptations were–and I mean this as warm praise–just about the only way I fell asleep every night when I was on the academic job […]

“Never, never will you use the brains the good God has given you.”

Poirot Investigates (Hercule Poirot, #3) by Agatha Christie

by Leave a Comment

Have been reading this in bits and pieces since November, but got a hankering to finish it this morning. I also realized it fits in with my only reading books by or about badass ladies in January, because Agatha Christie was certainly a badass lady. I don’t do short stories very often, for a lot of reason, but mainly because the idea of them exhausts me. You get invested for so little payoff, over and over again. But I think I might have to rethink […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo