Books 2022

Dec. 28th, 2022 04:07 am
mellicious: "I think the subtext here is rapidly becoming text." (subtext Buffy quote)
I just finished reading The Dictionary of Lost Words today, which I started, I swear it was like six months ago, and I kept putting it down and then picking it up again later. So I'm pleased to have finally finished, even if it gave me a huge headache because I cried a lot. (Spoilers! I probably cried when Esme gave the baby up, but I'm not sure because that's where I stopped the last time. But I cried basically all the way through the war years and right up to the end, I think.)

(That reminds me that my sister has yet to get accustomed to the way I cry during movies. I think I'm going to have to say, "Look, it's just what I do, so ignore it, please," because her making a big deal about it is even more annoying to me than the crying itself, which I'm accustomed to because I just have no control over it.)

I also read another Miss Marple book, which was A Murder is Announced. I don't have the one that's next in publication order, but I have some other ones I haven't read so I may quit worrying about reading them in order. They've all basically been standalones anyway - you don't really have to worry much about continuity between books, it seems. That may be partly because she wrote them so far apart - the first novel came out about 1930 and the one I just read, which is the fourth novel, came out in 1950. (I could tell it was postwar because they were talking about ration cards etc. - I'm old enough to remember how my older relatives used to talk endlessly about that stuff! But the two books before that basically just ignored the war even though I think they were actually written during the war years.)

I looked at the list of new (that is, new-to-me) books I've read this year and I'm at 59. Last year I think I read a few more than that but I was reading a lot of series mysteries and those tend to be short. Honestly I feel like I've been reading less, but I suspect I'm not, especially. And the list of re-reads is even longer.

mellicious: blinky holiday lights (holiday lights gif)
So, Warnock got reelected - whew. The idea of That Man (i.e., his opponent the football player) being in the Senate just made me shudder. (Plenty of football players are perfectly nice people. It's the part where some people presumably voted for him because of that - and despite his other issues - that bothers me.)


I haven't talked about reading yet, and I'm certainly capable of running on about that at some length. For now I'll just say that I have been reading Miss Marple, which I had never read before - I had read some Christie years ago but that was mostly the Poirot books. I guess I wasn't interested in reading about old people when I was young myself, but that's no longer the case and I'm enjoying Miss Marple. I read the first book a while back - that's The Murder at the Vicarage and I liked it but I had this sense I was missing something. I went on and read the second and third books, but what I finally figured out is that there are a bunch of short stories that were written first, which I guess accounts for my feeling that I was expected to know some of the characters ahead of time! And so I've gone back and I'm reading those, now.

(I don't know that Poirot is supposed to be all that young, either, but Miss Marple was always portrayed as a slightly-batty old lady, at least until Murder, She Wrote made her into a sort of icon. Now that I've read (some of) the books I see that that's just supposed to be people making assumptions.)




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