FYI: Next Post Is Also An Old One From My Drafts.

FYI: Next post is also an old one from my drafts.

Book Review: Three Blind Mice, Agatha Christie

My Review in a Tweet:

Agatha Christie's stories are a little cheesy, but despite that, they remain charming and puzzling, encouraging the reader to decipher for himself who's the culprit. This book in particular reunites delightful investigators: Poirot, Mrs Marple, Harley Quin and Sergeant Trotter.

My Full Review:

This book is another "first" for me, as my only contact with Agatha Christie's works was through the movie adaptations with Kenneth Branagh as the famous detective Hercule Poirot.

Imagine my delighted surprise when I realized the first story on this book was no other than the play in "See How They Run" (2022), another wonderful and funny whodunnit.

Since I'm not british, I don't know the tune for "Three Blind Mice", but the author was able to communicate the silliness of the murderer and the unnerving nature of all children lullabies, no matter where they are from.

The misteries in the book rely heavily on the dialogues and interviews from the investigator to the suspects, leaving descriptions of characters and places very short and a little dry.

The mysteries themselves are quite entertaining, only a couple of them were "predictable" (which I can tell if it is a good point for Agatha, for laying out the clues for the reader, or for me, being "smart enough" to solve the mystery before the reveal). Some of them felt a little rushed or solved out of nowhere, but those were only a few.

This is what I would call a nice summer reading: short stories, easy to pick up and to put down once you finish a mystery, engaging and entertaining.

8/10

My Other 2024 Readings.

"To the absence there's no one that can get used to Another sun is not your sun, even though it shines on you, And nostalgia is a nightmare"

Mario Benedetti, "Mar de la Memoria"

Book Review: Selección de poemas de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

My Review in a Tweet:

I can't be impartial with Bécquer, he's a central poet in one of the canon events of my life (my first love). Luckily, I could still enjoy his Rhymes, and I read for the first time his Literary Letters and his Legends (which some read like horror stories).

My Full Review:

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer is probably the first poet I read attentively, and I have loved him ever since I read his Rhymes for the first time. I gifted my copy because I was young and innocent, so I had to buy this book again.

Fortunately, this anthology includes not only his Rhymes, which I read again with great pleasure, but also his Literary Letters to a Woman and his Legends (each marked with a spanish city or theme).

Becquer fits perfectly in this romantic idea of poets, a brilliant and tortured genius, whose poems fill an intrincated metric and respect the rhyme while doing so. His themes also reflect this pinning, this painful way of experimenting romantic feelings, of tragic love.

The Literary Letters and the Symphonic Introduction of his Rhymes are wonderful works of poetic prose, blooming with beautiful allegories and metaphors, exuding such a love for Poetry itself you find yourself tempted to pick up a pen and follow in vain the steps of this bard.

I can't say much more other than restating my love for this author and his works: Becquer remains a core author of my taste in poetry in particular and literature in general.

My other 2024 readings.

Book Review: Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen

My Review in a Tweet:

I'm not drawn to Non-Fiction, but this autobiographic tale, while a bit slow, captivated me. The fourth part is jarring because it's a random collage of stories; the rest of the narration was great, coming back and forth in her memories until the moment she leaves the continent.

My Full Review:

Trying to diversify my readings, I picked up again this book I got as a Christmas present back in 2015 but never managed to finish. I'm not entirely sure this book qualifies as Non-Fiction, since it's still very poetic in the way the author describes her years in her coffee plantation at the foot of the Ngong Hills, but I describe it as NF because it is an autobiographic narration of a period of her life.

I still had to drag myself a little through some parts of the book, but that's not on Isak Dinesen (or more accurately, on Karen Blixen, her real name), it's on me and the genres I usually read being quite different from this. The book itself is structured into five parts, each of them separated into smaller chapters.

Even then, I enjoyed this book: Dinesen/Blixen has an artistic soul and a taste for the beauty in the world that makes her descriptions and tales really outstanding and marvelous, giving the reader a careful and joyful glimpse into the Africa of the early years of the 20th Century. The love she distills for her farm and the workers that come and go in her life, while sometimes might sound "problematic" from our modern set of values, makes you ache when tragedies and setbacks occur.

I wish the expression "abanico cultural" (cultural fan, as in the accesory for the hot days) existed in English, because that's what this book opens in front of you: a range of cultural and sometimes religious ways of being human, with just a tinge of the author's bias, and even when she's more openly judgemental of the ways of the masai and the other tribes, she still sees the beauty and wonder of their lifestyles.

The final part of the book, when she describes how all the problems of the farm start to pile up and she has to sell and leave Africa, really makes you feel sorry for her, hoping that fate will smile to her and turn the downtrend of her coffee productivity. When she finally leaves, it's like waking up from a pleasant dream of a sweet memory, and you are left with that bittersweet taste of longing.

7.5/10

My other 2024 readings.