The fiendish plot requires incessant, vertiginous POV shifting. This plus ellipsis abuse made for an unpleasant style - but no one reads Christie for style! A super clever premise, super cleverly executed.

This novel sets two types against each other: one is careless and selfish and charming, and the other is strong and silent and an old soul. They're nearly identical and both beautiful--blond and fair and male--and twenty/twenty-one. There's an inheritance at stake. There's a mystery.

Josephine Tey is a snob of the first order but I have to admit I love her for it.

“Sex is no mystery,” she said. “When poor Kraka, daughter of Sigurd Fafnirsbane, removed the tarred hat her stepfather had forced her to wear, down fell all her silky hair, and the bakers were so astonished by her beauty that they burned their bread. It‘s as simple as that.”

[John Proctor] was the kind of man—powerful of body, even-tempered, and not easily led—who cannot refuse support to partisans without drawing their deepest resentment. In Proctor‘s presence a fool felt his foolishness instantly—and a Proctor is always marked for calumny therefore.

My Goodreads review is too long to fit here, alas! https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2802451787

It is amazing how much better coffee grows when sung to by birds or when through an opened window comes the sound of a human voice reading words on paper that still holds the memory of the tree it used to be.

Thanks for the tag, @Dragon ! Let‘s see if I do all of this right...

1. Naomi Novik‘s Temeraire series. The Napoleonic Wars retold with an aerial corps of dragons!
2. Each of the first few books takes place on a different continent or so, I think I‘ll take China/Asia. Pavilions!
3. Australia, I think, I get grumpy in the heat.
4. Anyone who wants to do this!

@DannyHattan #WhatWouldYouDo

On love, on grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe‘s water with his wing.

I‘m preparing a presentation on this book for class tomorrow and this is why you don‘t try to be scholarly about books you love, it kills that love dead, dead I say 😭 At least looking at the cover of this edition still makes me happy!

I‘m having to read Gertrude Stein for school which I‘m doing with some reluctance but y‘all can‘t tell me this bit from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (written by one Gertrude Stein) isn‘t hilarious 😂

Exquisite and kind of perfect, actually. The prose is crystalline, and the book isn‘t “minimalist” because the word feels twee here and even “subtle” is precious. Imagine another.