MILD SPOILERS: Agatha Christie Reading Challenge

 Because I can: the Poirot parody sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look. 

It is bananas how ok Poirot is with the murderer doing themselves in at the end.

Granted, I've only blogged like 4 times since 2016, but I'm still not sure why I never thought to mention a massive reading challenge that I've been working on for 3 years: reading every Agatha Christie book in chronological order (not touching the Mary Westmacott stuff, though).

Why? In 2022 or so, a friend and I were discussing Hallowe'en Party and he mentioned that you can tell by how simple the writing was in comparison to earlier works that her mental abilities were starting to decline. It wasn't like I'd been keeping track of the dates of her stuff that I'd read, and this piqued my interest in tracking how her writing style developed. I started on The Mysterious Affair at Styles at some point the next year, and fast forwarding to now, I'm on One, Two Buckle My Shoe (my copy is titled An Overdose of Death). 

Tracking down some of the earlier works at my current library was annoying at first (my house has no more space for books, and some of the Kindle prices are ridiculous), but fortunately, my in-laws have been downsizing their collection of shoddy 1970s paperback copies. Unintentionally hilarious cover art abounds.

I'm not going not to review every book as I finish, because that's way more time and effort than I care to spend. Also, as I've started finding, there are some rather repetitive entries in her oeuvre. But I will do a few progress status check-ins as I see fit.

Lightning round observations so far:

1. Yes, I know casual bigotry was the norm back then, but it's still uncomfortable coming across ethnic slurs. I suppose it's very useful from a historian's perspective in showing us just how ingrained prejudice was in the way most people talked, but still, woof. In my collection of shoddy paperbacks, I've found a few that have that other title for And Then There None in the 'read more by the author' page; I've torn those out as I've come across them. And yet I'm guessing that Christie was seen as progressive back in the day with how she used Poirot as a way to illustrate British prejudice against foreigners. (I'm assuming this based on no evidence; let me know if I'm wrong.)

2. Christie will re-use names of people/places, not just like, after 10 books or so, but in the very next book. It annoys me an editor didn't step in. 

3. Early Christie books are painfully cringe with plucky young heroines picking the most boring characters to settle down with at the end. Anne Beddingfeld in The Man in the Brown Suit and Emily Trefusis in The Sittaford Mystery are probably the most disappointing examples. 

4. There is nothing worse than a Christie international caper. The Big Four is probably the stupidest, but The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery also make me unreasonably angry just thinking about them.

5. I know the fish paste stuff mentioned in Sad Cypress is probably terrible, but ever since first reading the book in middle school, I've wanted to try it because for some reason I imagine it to taste like some fancy aioli.

Abigail's Divine Comedy

 

If there's one thing I love more than literature and history, it's making fun of both of them. Over the past few years, I've thoroughly enjoyed @Joe Hegyes' Abigail Williams impressions, and I am so thrilled there's now a web series. I just wish I could have gone to the screening in Salem!

Personal lore corner: 

After reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond in 6th grade, I got very into the history of the Salem Witch Trials.

Said interest picked back up when I got the part of Mercy Lewis in a local theatre's production of The Crucible my senior year of high school. We are talking reading every non-fiction and historical fiction book at the library and watching every documentary about the trials. [Ok, technically I was cast just as one of the random background "Mary Warren, why are you hurting us" girls. But the actress playing ML was messing around too much backstage to hear her cue during rehearsals like a week before opening night, so I went on instead, and the director decided to bump me to playing the part for a few of the performances.] 

As it turns out, my mother-in-law is from Beverly, is descended from the Balch family (famous for having one of its members get ~fatally attacked by witches~ in 1690), and she basically grew up playing in the Rev. Hale House because her friend's parents were the caretakers. I have done my best to hide my freak flag from her, but I don't think I've ever fully succeeded.

Anyways, in 2020 I did a podcast episode about the Winona Ryder/Daniel Day Lewis movie version, and I'm pretty my fixation really comes through in it.

But more importantly, go watch "Abigail's Divine Comedy" NOW!

Back Again: An Often Told Lie

The past three years have been busier work- and extracurricular-wise than is healthy or normal. I've been stretched beyond belief in every part of my life, and my mental health has obviously taken a major hit. But more importantly, and less forgivable for sure, my ability to get any proper reading done has been basically nonexistent.

Over the past few years, I've read maybe 20 books tops a year. For someone who used to get through about 100 over the course of a year, it's been rough. What I have finished this year so far: mostly murder mysteries, and most of them poorly written at that. 

Re: my nonfiction reads: Everest, Inc. by Will Cockrell was pretty enjoyable. I find the audacity of climbing the 8,000ers very intriguing and take a morbid interest in when it all goes wrong. The book did a really good job of explaining how Everest went from a forbidding peak to a standard CEO bucket list item. Less juicy of a "look at these idiots paying thousands to die on a mountain" take than I was expecting, and more nuts and bolts about how these expedition companies started and, in good news, how the sherpas have started taking up more space in the money-making aspect. I'm still not sure whether I think the 'pros' of commercializing the mountain outweigh the cons (environmentally definitely a bad state of affairs, but commercialization -> fewer people die in preventable ways, like with better weather forecasts, etc., and shouldn't I be all about human progress and exploration?). But definitely a good read to get information that's not clickbait-y.

Bleak House: Lightning Round

 I blazed through Bleak House back in January, and while I thoroughly enjoyed it (I'm a fool for convoluted plots and way too many characters), there weren't really many deep questions or musings I had about it. So here's the lightning round of my thoughts:

1. I was expecting arcane legal jargon. I was not expecting spontaneous combustion.

2. John Jarndyce yeeting the food out of the carriage after Esther says she doesn't want it makes me laugh. What a moment to be extra.

3. I loved Mr. Guppy because he's such a tool; in my head, he's basically Jean-Ralphio from "Parks and Recreation."

4. I think I'm a Plantagenet Palliser, but I'm probably just a Mrs. Jellyby.

5. Frankly, someone should have beaten Harold Skimpole senseless years ago.

6. We need more gentlemen of deportment who take it upon themselves to show that deportment to the masses.

7. John Jarndyce:

"I'm the legal guardian for this teenage girl."

"I'm her employer now that she's an adult."

"I'm totally in love with her." 

NO.

8. Fallen Woman Dies Because She's a Fallen Woman Disease strikes again.

Daniel Deronda: Hateful Female Characters; Is George Eliot Cringey?

It took me longer than I wanted it to, but I finally finished reading George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. My winter reading list is Victorian literature, and I'd put Middlemarch down, since it's one of ~the~ 19th century novels. However, the library did not have it, so I went with the only Eliot novel on the shelf. The only thing I'd known about the book before was that the main character wears a gorgeous red-orange gown with an ivory jacket in an archery scene in the 2002 miniseries.

Overall, it was a pretty decent read, even if we didn't really need the last 20 or so pages.

Anyways, things that stood out to me:

Hateful Female Characters

Call it internalized misogyny or just me paying more attention to female characters because I too am female, but I am very good at hating women in literature. And I have to say, I really hated Gwendolen Harleth. The way she automatically sneers at all the other young women in the village and immediately writes all of them off as being intrinsically inferior to her is repulsive. Same for how she views her younger sisters as non-entities because ... they're normal teenagers and one of them seems to have either bad posture or something wrong with her shoulders. And let's not forget that her initial dislike of Mr. Lush and wanting to avoid him is because he's ugly. That it takes her entering into an emotionally abusive marriage to make her improve is pathetic and speaks to the lack of moral fiber she has. I don't think I buy her ~becoming a better person~ thing either; to me, it seems like she was just really infatuated with Daniel Deronda (in a very selfish way at that; who sends a letter to their crush on their wedding day?). 

I also saw some parallels between the way she treated and manipulated others with how Grandcourt treated her, albeit he's a lot more cruel than she is. Eliot even makes a reference to her knowing that she can't complain that much about his treatment of her seeing as she planned to manipulate and control him in their marriage. 

So basically the chapter in which Klesmer brutally informs her that she has no real artistic talent was absolutely delicious to me.

BUT let's not ignore her creepy enabling uncle, Gascoigne. This guy is a total social climber - he changed his last name from the boring Gaskin to the fancier sounding Gascoigne. Eliot mentions how he spends more time hobnobbing with more socially advantageous people than focusing on the poor and their needs like a minister ought to. And he is so, so weird about Gwendolen. He totally prioritizes her over his own daughter Anna, as well as criticizing Anna while praising Gwenny H in front of them both; in the archery ball scene when she's trying to be ~unique~ by not dancing the waltzes and polkas, the text mentions how he totally wants her to be distinguished in everything. Dude, stop obsessing over this one niece and start caring about your own family more, you weirdo. His losing his money due to bad investments felt well-deserved. While he's still going to get invited to stuff by the ~right kind of people~ because he's a rector, he's definitely going to feel the differences in status more acutely. Serves him right. [I suspect that he's so concerned with her making an advantageous marriage not just because it'd help her family out, but that he might benefit from it too.]

Side note: I do however like that Gwendolen is put off by the thought of marriage because of the sacrifices on the part of women that she's seen up close with her own mother's miserable second marriage (Davilow is an awesome last name, however) and that she wants to be able to do whatever she wants. The school I went to was always harping on about how it's women's spiritual role to sacrifice for their families, etc., etc., and I naturally developed the same attitude as Gwendolen.

Is George Eliot Cringey?

There are some critics who think the "Gwendolen" content is better than the "Daniel" chapters; apparently one commentator back in the day went so far as to suggest the novel be improved by cutting all the Daniel content and calling it "Gwendolen Harleth" (but I'm pretty sure that was because that person was an anti-Semite). I wouldn't go so far as that, but a lot of the Daniel content feels ... off. Like Eliot is trying too hard. Especially with Mirah's tale of epic melodrama, suffering, and struggles against her corrupted father. Granted, the Victorians were all about the melodrama and virtuous heroines. But for some reason, it seems like Elliot was trying too hard to make Mirah the perfect heroine, above approach in all ways. Granted, she was probably doing this deliberately so no prejudiced readers could find fault with a Jewish protagonist. Still, to modern eyes, it still feels so cringey. If Eliot were alive today, she'd totally have one of those "In this house, we..." yard signs while sending her kids to private school. [This Guardian article says "her portrayal of the innocent Mirah swings the other way, so saintly it has shades of the noble savage." Pretty much.]

Ditto with Elliot lacing practically every single language with references, both well-known and obscure, to the Torah and Jewish history to show that she alone amongst the goyim knows Jewish culture. [mostly unrelated: George Eliot always strikes me as one of those "I'm not like other girls; I'm one of the boys" women] By all means, I applaud her for A) not accepting the ingrained antisemitism of her day and wanting to make a stand and B) doing research and becoming familiar with Jewish history. But it does come across very heavy-handed, especially for a modern audience. In trying to show the Jewish characters as belonging to a venerable, illustrious, and fascinating culture worthy of society's respect, it came across as her robbing them of their agency by making them more of "characters" than individual, fully fleshed people. Or at least that's how it seemed to me. Which is a shame, because I don't think I've come across many Jewish characters in British literature who we're supposed to root for before. 

Also, she isn't above using some anti-Semitic tropes herself in trying to show Daniel's initial prejudiced assessment of the Cohen family - she makes them out to be money-grubbing and even refers to Ezra Cohen as oily. [I also suspect that Eliot didn't have much regard for normal non-intellectual types, but I have nothing to back that up with since I've only read Silas Marner (the kid's hair color is symbolic for the lost gold, groundbreaking) and The Mill on the Floss (hello, sibling incest vibes) and don't know that much about Eliot herself.]

Ok, I've been gone for several years at this point...

 But I'm back! 

Two Tech Books; One Clear Winner

In addition to reading sea tales this summer, I've made a brief venture into tech reads with Antonio Garcia Martinez's Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley and Dan Lyon's Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble.

image via Amazon

Chaos Monkeys is about Martinez's experiences getting into advertisement strategy and working in Silicon Valley. He switches his career as a quantitative analyst at Goldman Sachs for at a stint at Adchemy. He later forms a start-up called AdGrok, sells it to Twitter, and then works for Facebook before getting fired.

Disrupted retells Lyons' venture into Hubspot after getting laid off from Newsweek. For a self-styled cynical journalist, the inbound-advertising company is part nightmare, part bizarre anthropological expedition. He navigates an unfriendly office culture that's completely different from the journalism field and which favors youth over experience because of costs. Eventually, he gets a job as a screenwriter for HBO's Silicon Valley and later leaves Hubspot for the now-defunct ValleyWag. He also becomes the intended victim of cybercrime when his Hubspot boss attempts to get hold of the manuscript before publication; Lyons discusses this at the end of the book.

The reactions I had to the books were polar opposites. Disrupted I thoroughly enjoyed; Chaos Monkeys I loathed. But why?

Chaos Monkeys' narration is so repulsive. Martinez insists on adopting a smug, bitter persona throughout the entire book. Reviewers on other platforms have referred to it as imitating gonzo-style journalism (I can't weigh in, as I know little about that writing style). At any rate, he routinely rips down other people and their accomplishments in Chaos Monkeys. He's an insufferable pseudo-intellectual and makes a point to throw in as many references and quotes from philosophical texts and world history as possible, even when it adds no value to his work. (Note: I'm a total tool when it comes to this sort of thing, and even I'm not as obnoxious as Martinez.)

We also get to see him show off what a terrible parent he is; after fathering two children, he decides to walk out of their lives because the idea of having a normal relationship with his family is too bourgeois for him to consider (why would you flaunt your personal failings and the sad details of your children's private lives like that??).

But the worst part of Chaos Monkeys is the rampant sexism. Descriptions of women that don't reduce them to sex objects or completely belittle them are the exception, not the rule.

For example, take the following passage:

"Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of ****. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they'd become precisely the sort of useless baggage you'd trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel."

He dismisses the former Business Insider editor and UPenn-educated Courtney Comstock as a reporter with a "porn star name." In discussing Tech Crunch's legitimate concern about sexism in Silicon Valley, he smirks about how they're always "agonizing" over it. He can't even simply concede the fact that a woman came up with a better idea for putting ads on Facebook than he did; he has to spend time describing her wardrobe (I guess because French women who dress fashionably aren't supposed to be as competent?), accuse her of being a social climber at Facebook, and hint that her ideas weren't valid.

Of course, his miserable persona was a deliberate choice. It's meant to create buzz about his book that otherwise might not exist.

image via Amazon

My take on Disrupted was much different. I found some fault with his attitude; he does sound rather arrogant time to time (especially in regards to going from respected journalist to tech newcomer), and his inability to grasp the consequences of what one posts on social media is baffling. But overall, the narrative is an entertaining one. He finds a lot to criticize at Hubspot, but the tone is less one of Olympian disdain and more that of genuine shock and confusion. In particular, his allegations of age discrimination are kind of horrifying, such as coworkers calling him "Grandpa Buzz" and the company's CEO saying in a New York Times interview that Hubspot actively prioritizes hiring young people and thinks work experience is overrated.

I may also be biased. I'm a young curmudgeon who generally eyes everything targeting the youth demographic with suspicion, and Silicon Valley is one of my favorite TV shows.

I'm pretty disappointed that Chaos Monkeys was so foul. It was more informative about the tech start-up world and its players than Disrupted. Had it been written by someone other than Martinez, it probably would have been a much better book. Disrupted is an actual story; Chaos Monkeys comes across as the literary equivalent of this Onion article.