Year-End Booklist 2018

January 9, 2019March 2, 2021 ~ andrewfindlaywrites ~ Leave a comment

Reality unraveled at an even faster rate than usual throughout 2018, and its disintegration brought a corresponding uptick in anxiety, confusion, and general not-goodness. Luckily, books were here, doing what they always do: transforming chaos into meaning, helping humanity impose order on the universe through the exercise of words, words, words. I read sixty-four books and enjoyed most of them. Some of my reading preferences have changed (I’m getting more and more of a yen for nonfiction and enjoy less and less SF written before 1973) and some have stayed the same (I still cannot stand the let’s-focus-on-a-succession-of-trivial-details style of “Literary Fiction” storytelling — if you’re doing lit fic, every word better be beautiful or something weird better be happening (good job, Jesmyn Ward!)). At bottom is a full list of what I read in 2018, but following are some recommendations based on that list.

Top 5 Recommended Fiction Books

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

Picture of a Le Guin novel collection — Left Hand is good, but honestly just get this and read her entire Hainish series.

Always and forever, everyone should read this. An envoy of a galactic civilization undertakes first contact on a winter-locked world where gender does not exist. It perfectly melds mysticism, future history, clear prose, thriller tension, and sheer beauty. I am not overstating the matter when I say this book changed Science Fiction forever. The audiobook version is wonderful, read by George Guidall.

The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells (4-novella series)

murderbot computer shelf — Ebooks are great until you need to take a picture. Ah well. Murderbot is still incredible.

I was surprised by this one. I bought the first entry, “All Systems Red,” because I couldn’t resist the title. I expected a fun book about a badass far-future killer robot, and that’s what I got, but I also got a tightly-written thriller about personal accountability and the dangers of the economics of exploitation, with an incredibly empathetic protagonist thrown in as a bonus. The Murderbot of the title calls itself that. It’s a SecUnit, a cyborg loaned out to space expeditions to protect humans. The protagonist hacks its “governor module” and gains the ability to do whatever it wants. Mostly, what it wants is to curl up in the corner, not interact with anyone, and watch massive amounts of illegally-downloaded space TV because, as it turns out, non-governor-moduled SecUnits have crippling social anxiety (no social skills + constant pressure to appear normal so as to avoid getting scrapped as defective). Problem is, the humans it is contracted to protect stumble into the middle of a lethal conspiracy, and Murderbot has to get to work. The mix of the SecUnit’s extreme competence melded with its crushing social anxiety builds a character that’s fun to watch as it kicks ass but easy to relate to as it complains about what it has to do.

The Odyssey, Homer/Emily Wilson

Odyssey fagles on a bookshelf — So, this is not the Wilson translation, but I mean, close enough

Along with The Iliad, the oldest story in the Western canon (Gilgamesh beats it out by a millennium, but it’s Sumerian). It fascinates me because Odysseus’ concerns are so close to our concerns (returning home, vengeance, atonement), and Homer’s narrative techniques are so close to what we use (metaphor, story-within-a-story, thrilling action scenes). I also love Odysseus, the clever bastard who lies with the ease of Huckleberry Finn, executes complex strategy more smoothly than Napoleon, and murders enemies as easily as the man with the hammer in a 19th-century Chicago slaughterhouse. It’s also just a real swashbuckler — Odysseus is basically a pirate, reaving his way around the Aegean, sneaking in and out of kingdoms under assumed identities, outsmarting enemies. It’s great stuff. I read Emily Wilson’s new translation, which I enjoyed. My go-to is Robert Fagles, but Wilson used more down-to-Earth, modernized language and a tripping rhythm. It also avoided euphemisms — all the people serving wine and drawing baths weren’t called “serving girls” — they were called slaves.

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

nice rich lady, fears death — On the surface, just rich people running around. whiling away the time. Inside, so much more.

I barely remember what happened in this book because I was so deeply engaged with the people of this book. Joyce gets a lot of buzz for his stream of consciousness technique, but Woolf is the undisputed master. So smoothly, so effortlessly does she slip the reader inside a character that you don’t feel sad or happy or heartstring-tugged, external to the character. You are brought into their sensorium, you experience as they experience all the emotional complexity of humanity — a woman’s simultaneous dissatisfaction with and love of her life, a soldier’s slowly increasing PTSD, the soft regret of a wistful lover — you don’t watch these emotions, you are in them, entirely thanks to Virginia Woolf, one of the greatest talents of the 20th century.

Le Chien Jaune (The Yellow Dog), Georges Simenon

Ceci n'est pas un chien — Yellow Dog. What a weird book title.

This book isn’t as must-read or upending/impressive as some of the others on this list, but I loved it because it was my first Simenon. Georges Simenon wrote dozens of detective novels starring Inspector Jules Maigret, a down-to-earth detective who waits and sees, who asks around, who lets the solution develop without any outlandish cerebrational tricks. The language is clear and direct, the pacing is good, the characterization exists in that perfect detective-novel style in which the author puts a splash of paint on each character, just enough to vividly identify them and give them clear motivations, and then sets them loose, light and free, into the plot.

Top 5 Recommended Nonfiction Books

1491, Charles C. Mann

Amazing, life-changing. Everyone should read this book because it explores an American history that high school textbooks leave pretty fuzzy or outright misleading. Indian societies were larger, were more culturally complex, and had more of an effect on their environment than we’re taught. Most Europeans observed Indian settlements after what was basically a zombie apocalypse (some estimates of the indigenous death rate from European diseases is 90%+), so our conception of American Indians has about as much to do with their pre-contact society as The Walking Dead has with ours. It’s written in a clear, engaging style, and literally every single fact Mann offers up is fascinating. For example, ancient Indians in the Yucatan bio-engineered a type of prairie grass into maize, one of the most important crops in the history of Earth. It’s mind-blowing that anyone could achieve this without modern gene-splicing technology. This scientific achievement, to hear 1491 tell it, is just a few steps behind Victor Frankenstein’s.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

HeLa saves lives, give her credit — Great job balancing the science with the human story.

Multilayered history of the most famous cell line in the history of science, HeLa. HeLa cells are immortal — the line will keep dividing and dividing, infinitely, and those identical cells can be used to test vaccines, cancer treatments, basically anything having to do with medicine’s effect on the human body. Problem is, the cells were harvested from Henrietta Lacks, a black woman living in Baltimore, at a time when the phrase “medical ethics” got, at best, an apologetic shrug from doctors. Lacks had terminal cervical cancer, and a scraping of her cells ended up being immortal and incredibly useful (and expensive, at $250 a vial) to science. Problem is, Henrietta’s descendants are still living in poverty in Baltimore. A beautifully interwoven tale of the scientific feats made possible by HeLa, the bioethical problems arising from them, and a biography of the Lacks family and their concerns. Both an exploration of towering scientific achievements and of the people whom Science™ marginalized to make it happen.

Born a Crime, Trevor Noah

A delightful autobiography, read delightfully by Trevor Noah himself. It seems half of audiobooks are recorded with this weird, half-breathless, simultaneously melodramatic but solemn style that just puts me to sleep. Trevor reads this lightly, with real humor and feeling, and his engagement with the text translates to our enjoyment of it. The subject matter is his childhood in South Africa, where he was born a crime — the son of a white man and a black woman, relations between whom were illegal under apartheid. It ranges from his Mom’s attempts to build a good life for him, to his time (briefly) in a private school, to his teenage career as an off-the-books DJ and black market CD seller. It is infused with love and humor, and while it is mostly the story of the lives of two people — Trevor Noah and his mother — you can’t tell the story of a person’s life without telling the story of the place they live, so it gives insight into South African society. More than anything else, this is a work dedicated to his mother, her determination, her quirks, and her love for him.

Pale Rider, Laura Spinney

The book that warns you about ducks — This book contains a lot of duck-based warnings.

A history of the Spanish Flu that reads almost like a thriller as the disease tears across the globe, devastating a pre-CDC world. The origin point of the Spanish Flu is not entirely clear (other than it didn’t start in Spain), but it was a global pandemic once it really got going, fueled by the demobilization of WWI soldiers. The book alternates between interesting factoids and visceral, atmospheric descriptions of what humans in the middle of outbreaks experienced — the most surreal were the excerpts from the journal of a young doctor in Rio de Janeiro as that vibrant city slowly went quiet, to the point that the government couldn’t keep up with the deaths and “[p]eople would prop the feet of the dead up on the window ledges so that public assistance agencies would come to take them away.” One important fact — the most common natural reservoirs of influenza are waterfowl, and a little shift in the protein coat (allowing the disease to attack humans instead of birds) of any given virus is all that’s needed to set off an outbreak. So stay the hell away from ducks. Or surround yourself with ducks and develop immunity before the next pandemic.

I Contain Multitudes, Ed Yong

A wonderful hard-science read. Yong, with a deft and clear pen, explores the science of what’s inside us, mostly our guts. In every person, human cells are outnumbered by microbes that achieve all manner of vital tasks, ranging from digestion to the regulation of brain chemistry. Humanity is not Yong’s sole focus — he takes us through the microbiome of multiple other species. Not a lot of forward momentum other than “Oh man that’s so cool to know!” but the facts used are so well-selected and -explained that the book develops a kind of propulsive intellectual excitement.

The End

So that’s it. Ten books I read last year that I think everyone should read, and that I hope everyone will enjoy. Books that expanded my emotional landscape, that scratched my itch for adventure, that tickled my intellectual fancy, that filled me with facts that are good to know, that made my world more complete, less shattered by the constant informational onslaught from the global trashfire that was 2018.

If you care to skim the sixty-four books I read last year, my finishing a book at all is a soft recommendation. So go for it.

List of Every Book I Read in 2018

To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf

Murder on the Orient Express — Agatha Christie

All Systems Red — Martha Wells

Night Watch — Terry Pratchett

Le Petit Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe — Kij Johnson

Kalpa Imperial — Angélica Gorodischer

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks — Rebecca Skloot (nonfiction)

Six Wakes — Mur Lafferty

The Traitor Baru Cormorant — Seth Dickinson

I Contain Multitudes — Ed Yong (nonfiction)

Les Misérables Tome 3 – Marius — Victor Hugo

Lords and Ladies — Terry Pratchett

Sing, Unburied, Sing — Jesmyn Ward

Life, the Universe, and Everything — Douglas Adams

The Collapsing Empire — John Scalzi

The King of Elfland’s Daughter — Lord Dunsany

Artificial Condition — Martha Wells

War on Peace — Ronan Farrow (nonfiction)

Rocannons World — Ursula K. Le Guin

Planet of Exile — Ursula K. Le Guin

City of Illusions — Ursula K. Le Guin

The Metamorphoses — Ovid

No Time to Spare — Ursula K. Le Guin (nonfiction)

Diplomatic Immunity — Lois McMaster Bujold

Le scaphandre et le papillon — Jean-Dominique Bauby (nonfiction)

The Hidden Life of Trees — Peter Wohlleben (nonfiction)

Proven Guilty — Jim Butcher

Fear — Bob Woodward

Trail of Lightning — Rebecca Roanhorse

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance — Lois McMaster Bujold

Emma — Jane Austen

Exit Strategy — Martha Wells

Monstress vol. 1 — Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda

Grant — Ron Chernow (nonfiction)

Lud-in-the-Mist — Hope Mirrlees

A Darker Shade of Magic — V.E. Schwab

A Gathering of Shadows — V.E. Schwab

A Conjuring of Light — V.E. Schwab

Monstress vol. 2 — Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda

The Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx (nonfiction)

The Conquest of Bread — Peter Kropotkin (nonfiction)

Hunger — Roxane Gay (nonfiction)

The Illustrated Man — Ray Bradbury

Born a Crime — Trevor Noah

Thief of Time — Terry Pratchett

The Genius of Birds — Jennifer Ackerman (nonfiction)

The Odyssey — Homer, Emily Wilson

Exit Strategy — Martha Wells

Pale Rider — Laura Spinney (nonfiction)

Frankenstein — Mary Shelley

The Snowman —Jo Nesbø

Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf

Roughing It — Mark Twain (nonfiction? ish?)

1491 — Charles C. Mann (nonfiction)

The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin

Carpe Jugulum — Terry Pratchett

A Study in Scarlet — Arthur Conan Doyle

The Maltese Falcon — Dashiell Hammett

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain

The Consuming Fire — John Scalzi

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry — Neil deGrasse Tyson (nonfiction)

How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? — N.K. Jemisin

Three Men in a Boat — Jerome K. Jerome

Le Chien Jaune — Georges Simenon

The Wizard and the Prophet — Charles C. Mann (nonfiction)

Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty’s Spaceship Murder Mystery Book, Is Incredible

March 7, 2018March 7, 2018 ~ andrewfindlaywrites ~ Leave a comment

This Nebula Award nominee disorients and terrifies from the start and only tightens the screws from there

Your eyes pop open, and you’re locked in a pod with no memory of having entered it. You don’t know how to get out. You start remembering — you’re a member of a small crew on an interstellar ship. Your last memory is moving into your quarters and attending the pre-launch festivities. When you finally struggle free of the synth-amneo fluid cradling you in your pod (no small feat in zero-g), you see your corpse floating in front of you, among the rest of your slaughtered crew. And your (dead) body is decades older than you remember it being.

Body floating in space — *It’s not clear from the cover exactly what happened, but it’s safe to assume it’s pretty bad*

That’s how Six Wakes starts, bombarding the reader with particle after particle of WTF until the narrative splits entirely from the mundane world. It’s the story of six clones selected to tend an interstellar ship carrying thousands of frozen people to an Earth-like planet. Cryo-sleep is fine for the humans, but clones (which are, legally, a different species) can just regenerate themselves endlessly and run maintenance for the hundreds of years it will take their less durable counterparts to get from point A to point B. Once you legally become a clone, you can maintain a “mind map,” basically a terabytes-big thumb drive that holds an imprint of everything you know and are. When you die, your mind map is loaded into your new brain, and you wake up as a 20-year-old. Of course, you are sterilized by law, as you are considered your own offspring. You have to maintain a mind map, which is subject to search and seizure by the authorities at any time. If you kill yourself, you’ll never be resurrected, so even if you’re practically immortal, you still have to deal with your 80s every time.

The problem in Six Wakes is that the crew wakes up to see their old bodies strewn gruesomely across the cloning bay, with no memory of how it happened. The terror is deep and weird from page 1 — the crew knows they were murdered, but have no idea how it happened.

A ship whose habitable space is fairly small, the grimness that comes from being a fresh murder scene, and the fear of not knowing what happened aren’t even the main source of dread. The big problem, the terrifying problem, is that you’re certain one of the people you’re looking at killed you.

As the characters attempt to figure out what happened, they start learning more about each other. The most interesting part of the book, aside from the high concept of cloning, is this narrative trick of having the primary action happen in the most claustrophobic place, trapped on a ship with [a] murderer[s], but having each of the six main characters’ backgrounds happen all over a wide-open far future world, ranging from a jail cell in Asia to a hacking lab on the Luna colony.

In the primary “oh no we’re trapped on a murdership” narrative, the story terrifies and creates constant pressure. The secondary narrative, the six backstories that are key to figuring out what happened, expands and deepens the world by exploring how each multi-century old clone became who they are.

As more facts about each clone are slotted into place, the shape of their predicament becomes more and more clear — the deep dive into the psyche of each character builds the map of what happened directly prior to their emergency resurrection. Each step in the spare, high-tension environment of the ship propels the story forward, and each revelation of a character’s past lends the narrative a depth and majesty. It’s a welcome contrast, like rich cream poured over an acidic key lime pie — both are good alone, but together they’re perfect.

This is a murder mystery action thriller, with a heaping helping of “look at all this cool tech” thrown in. The magic of it is that the very basis of the mystery (oh no we died we better find out who killed us) brings up such profound questions of identity, of personhood, that the glorious pulpiness of fleeing a murderer is layered over the granite bedrock of serious philosophical enquiry — when I say “I”, who do I mean? What makes a person a person, and what can unmake them?

The novel is so good from the very start. I flipped through the first few pages in a bookstore months ago and immediately put it back, thinking it had to be a trick — no way can the rest of the book maintain that level of greatness. I picked it up when I saw it was nominated for a Nebula — it does deliver on the promise of the first five pages. There are a few things to nitpick (one specific part of the resolution, involving saliva, broke suspension of disbelief for me), but Mur Lafferty is a powerful, imaginative author. Any writer who can build worlds as deep and rich as she can, who can craft a story that delights with its inventiveness and terrifies with its revelations, is one who deserves rapt attention. I am definitely snapping up whatever book she puts out next.

Three essential features Blade Runner 2049 inherited from the original science-fiction classic

God, Philip K. Dick. You're the greatest

October 7, 2017October 7, 2017 ~ andrewfindlaywrites ~ Leave a comment

Visual style, an ethical dilemma, and great casting made the original Blade Runner incredible, and Denis Villeneuve built the sequel the same way

The science fiction neo-noir classic Blade Runner is the single greatest book adaptation ever made. It’s laughably divergent from its source material — it picked up Philip K. Dick’s concept of androids and that the world was screwed and didn’t run with much else. Usually, this ends poorly for everyone involved, and the result is less like Lord of the Rings and more like The Hobbit. The film worked because androids, the idea it cuts out of the book like a painting out of a gilt frame, is morally and intellectually the most interesting part, and because it filled in all the holes around that idea with a style so distinct and clear that every frame of the film is a work of art. Also, Harrison Ford’s star wattage doesn’t hurt.

The gulf between an original movie and a 35-years-late sequel is similar to the distance between a book and its movie. Blade Runner 2049 took a different direction with its source material — a direct and respectful homage to its original. The difference between it and something like The Force Awakens is that it stakes out enough of its own turf not to be an artistic failure. Hate to be a buzzkill, and I loved seeing it in theaters, but The Force Awakens was a beat-for-beat remake of A New Hope without a single new idea of its own. So, why is Blade Runner 2049 a success?

Well, before you go any further, take a gander at what you can see in theaters this weekend:

The strengths of the original Blade Runner

The success of the first Blade Runner comes down to its visuals, the stimulating central problem of replicants, and Harrison Ford. Its worldbuilding is the greatest artistic achievement of that decade, and it builds its world with visuals. Everything is gritty, wet, and cramped, either too bright or too dark, except for the Tyrell corporation building which is a soft-lit, wide temple to wealth and power. Rick Deckard’s job in the movie is “retiring” rogue replicants, androids who have begun acting anomalously. The movie spins around the moral core of killing sentient beings just because they’re acting like sentient beings, i.e. seeking freedom. Deckard never seems thrilled to be doing it, and towards the end of the film he not only falls in love with a replicant, but begins doubting whether he is one. Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard is the final style piece of the film — no one has a better put-upon-why-me face, and he’s also Harrison freaking Ford.

The movie’s plot is well-constructed, but it’s not the central component of the movie’s watchability. The action in Blade Runner is understated, almost ponderous, but what keeps the film going is that every single frame is beautiful, is art. It’s easy to watch because the literal act of viewing each frame is rewarding.

Blade Runner 2049, genetics, and inheritance

Blade Runner 2049 is definitely its father’s son. Denis Villeneuve tries to rebuild the same world Ridley Scott constructed in 1982, just adding in three more decades of we’re-screwed. There’ve been several bloody replicant revolutions and a complete ecological collapse. The first bankrupted the Tyrell Corporation (original manufacturer of replicants) and the second was solved by the agri-tech of Blade Runner 2049’s main antagonist, Niander Wallace (who bought up Tyrell’s assets and started making “safer” replicants).

Denis Villeneuve pays the same attention to visual worldbuilding as Ridley Scott did, only it’s a world 30 years more bleak. Urban areas are an industrial wasteland filled with scavengers, rust, and death, and natural spaces are an ecological wasteland filled with cracked earth, dust storms, and dead trees. People live in the middle of these extremes, in a cityscape filled with ever-advancing technology. The interplay of light and dark, the picture-perfect artistry of each frame of the movie is still there, paying perfect homage to the original.

The ethics of the sequel have shifted. Not only has the replicant-as-slave trope been made explicit, with Niander Wallace (tech magnate and the current manufacturer of replicants) stating that “[e]very civilization was built off the back of a disposable workforce” and regretting that he couldn’t breed replicants (as slaves were bred), but the main character, Ryan Gosling’s Officer K, starts the movie as an indisputable replicant, the property of the L.A.P.D. Blade Runner’s morality was ambiguous — the inventor of replicants, Eldon Tyrell, was a benevolent creator, and Rick Deckard’s attitude was “I’m killing replicants, ain’t it a shame, but hey, what else can we do?” In Blade Runner 2049, a definite replicant is struggling with issues of identity and morality. An unambiguous member of an oppressed class is at the center of the sequel, which changes the ethical landscape significantly. Not to mention Jared Leto’s amazingly creepy Niander Wallace is, unlike Eldon Tyrell, undoubtedly a Bad Guy (murder, torture, etc.).

Blade Runner 2049 has the same approach to plot as its progenitor — make it good, but don’t make it the center of the movie. The sheer beauty of the world that’s built is what makes the film. Its approach to action is a bit different — in the original, it’s a few short bursts of gunplay and chasing. In 2049, the fight scenes might be rare, but they’re definitely modern. Officer K is literally, as he was built, a killing machine, and it’s impressive to watch when he gets in a corner where the only way out is violence.

Ryan Gosling vs Harrison Ford

How cruel to put any actor up against living legend Harrison Ford, but Gosling does a really great job. Same balance of grim but emotional right underneath, same ratio of acting chops versus sheer ability to look cool. Ryan Gosling might be Harrison Ford for Millennials — good actor, attractive, with the ability to fill out an action movie without being typecast as an action star. Harrison Ford is part of what made Blade Runner great, and Ryan Gosling definitely adds style and charm to 2049. Ford is a legend, but Gosling is a worthy inheritor.

Blade Runner 2049 is the sequel every great movie deserves

Blade Runner 2049 and its predecessor are both primarily visual experiences. The plot of each is clear and strong, but the center of each film is just seeing the world it builds. Each frame, as a still photo, is interesting enough to make you want to see the next one. Preserving and intensifying the central moral quandary of the original and adding Gosling’s star power to the mix just adds more to love.

Blade Runner 2049 is heavily indebted to the original, but that’s by design. What’s important is that Villeneuve had the courage to use everything important about the original film — the stunning visual style and the central moral question of replicants — but still carve out his own original space. It might not be taught in film classes like Blade Runner is (yet), but the beauty of a director making an intellectual property his own is that one-to-one comparisons are no longer relevant. Villeneuve and Gosling made their own thing here, and it stands alone, and it stands strong.

How Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage Helped me Mourn my Mom’s Death

August 19, 2017June 17, 2019 ~ andrewfindlaywrites ~ 1 Comment

My mother loved the Queen of Crime Fiction, and for good reason, it turns out

Agatha Christie has been outsold by two people: Shakespeare and God. The only books to outsell hers are Shakespeare’s plays and the Bible. Despite that popularity, I was not impressed by my first foray into her works, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and I was even less impressed by The A.B.C. Murders. While the first was enjoyable, and played with the conventions of mystery novels in one very particular and striking way, it didn’t grab me. The second I found gimmicky and empty. I rather agreed with Raymond Chandler, who characterized what happens in English detective stories as “the same old futzing around with timetables and bits of charred paper and who trampled the jolly old flowering arbutus under the library window.” As happens so often, actual knowledge of something is all that’s necessary to kill disdain for it. I crossed that barrier with The Murder at the Vicarage, the book I buried with my mother.

Agatha Christie's book — Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, with shelf

My mother loved reading. It was her defining hobby, and she loved Agatha Christie especially, having read every book she wrote. So, in the surreal logic of grief, I decided to put one copy of Christie’s work in the ground with her, so she’d have something to do. The copy was The Murder at the Vicarage, for the simple reason that it was one of the first to come to hand when I reached into her massive Agatha Christie cupboard. Once I was home after the back and forth and tumult of the funeral, I turned all my energy to consuming that book as fast as possible. If it was worth burying with my mom, surely it was worth reading, right? I read it on my phone while waiting in line, listened to it in my car while commuting, and spent a lot of time reading it normally at night. It was my last goodbye, and I wanted to give it the attention it deserved. The result was going at breakneck speed through the work of a master craftswoman. She’s pretty amazing, y’all.

So, what is The Murder at the Vicarage actually about?

The Murder at the Vicarage is narrated by a village vicar, Leonard Clement. He’s married to a much younger wife, Griselda Clement. After a few introductory pages, a man that everyone in the village despises to varying levels, Colonel Protheroe, is found shot through the head in the vicar’s study. The book after that point introduces many characters, all who had a reason to dislike the insufferable Colonel, and explores various scenarios under which they could have killed the victim. The only person who can see through all the chaff of misdirection is Miss Marple, in her first outing as one of Christie’s best-loved sleuths. Maybe she’s the reason why this ended up being the book I chose from among the handful I pulled off my mother’s bookshelf — the detective is an old lady of hidden depths and impressive intelligence (hi my mom was like, smart as hell).

Why Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries are so good

Crime writer Agatha Christie — Dame Agatha Christie. She sees right through you.

Agatha Christie is escapist literature, definitely, so long as the people using that term aren’t dull enough to think it’s shorthand for less-than or non-literary. She’s one of the most impressive craftsmen I’ve ever read. She builds plots like the Swiss build clocks — everything is tiny, seemingly insignificant, but it all fits together in clear and important ways once the work is done. Through and around all the logic puzzles and plot twists, there is strong, clear writing and an impressively deep understanding of human nature.

For people who are addicted to Agatha Christie, a good portion of the fun is figuring out whodunnit. I’m abysmal at this — I had not the least suspicion of the actual evildoers at any point throughout any of the three Christie books I’ve read. Dad tells me that mom got to where she could get it right about half the time. The thing that seems almost unfair, paradoxically, is that Dame Christie gives you everything you need to know exactly who murdered whom. The mystery is built perfectly — the answer is hidden, but each detail on each page of the story fits seamlessly with all others to point to only one conclusion — if you’ve got the skill to slot them together in the right order. I do not. In this particular book, the narrator runs across the killer carrying a rock. This is damning evidence, but neither the narrator nor I has any idea. Generally, you’re not smart enough to figure it out, but there’s a lot of pleasure in the examination of every little occurrence and the formation of your (in my case) inevitably wrong theory. This exercise completely occupies the mind, and pulls your brain more fully into the book than with other escapist literature. It’s half small-town dialogue and half LSAT logic puzzle.

The sheer strength and clarity of writing is a joy to read. It’s the style of writing that many of the best use, where you don’t even realize how powerfully that style is building a world around you, putting you exactly where it wants you. The powerful can make you do or feel what they want, but the truly powerful make you do it without even realizing it. It’s so strong it doesn’t need to be showy. Just an example, without further commentary:

“You see,” she began at last, “living alone, as I do, in a rather out-of-the-way part of the world, one has to have a hobby. There is, of course, woolwork, and Guides, and Welfare, and sketching, but my hobby is–and always has been–Human Nature. So varied–and so very fascinating. And, of course, in a small village, with nothing to distract one, one has such ample opportunity for becoming what I might call proficient in one’s study.”

This is the source of Miss Marple’s power. Sure, her template is just that of the nosy old neighbor, but add to that her keen intelligence and singular understanding of human nature, and she’s a dangerous adversary. There’s something so delicious in an unassuming old lady, ignored by most and feared by none, having the perspicacity to pierce through to the truth and undo all the careful plotting of the murderer.

Another of Miss Marple’s quotes, savage to the extreme, was on the subject of her modern novelist nephew:

“His poems have no capital letters in them, which is, I believe, the essence of modernity. His books are about unpleasant people leading lives of surpassing dullness.”

Unassuming old lady, able to tear the heart out of anyone who doesn’t impress her. I also particularly love this quote because it’s so true. I love modern fiction on the level of Midnight’s Children or Infinite Jest, but so much gets a pass as serious literature simply because it’s boring and miserable, which must mean it is Important. The 100 pages of Franzen’s The Corrections to which I had the fortitude to subject myself is some of the worst “literature” I’ve ever read. Unpleasant people and lives of surpassing dullness, indeed.

Agatha Christie, my mother, and me

Me, mom, dad, sister on a bridge in nature — My favorite family photo, featuring my dad, who is a big reason I love nature and didn’t end up an indoor kid. I’ll never have to write anything about that, because he’s going to live forever.

Agatha Christie gives you plenty to chew on in this novel. The frantic fitting together of every little detail as you read, hoping to prove to yourself that you’re smart enough to figure it out before the big reveal. The satisfaction of the big reveal itself, as the intricate structure of everything she’s built up to that point becomes apparent. The deep understanding of people, what they want, and how they act. Christie pulling all this out of a small village in the middle of a quiet old English county is perhaps the most impressive thing she does. It reflects actual life so well — no matter how little is happening, no matter how boring something appears to be, there is always depth to it, like a drop of water under a microscope shows an entire unimagined world, teeming with microbes.

It helped me grieve for my mother because while I was reading it, she was right there with me. I’m so much like her that she won’t be gone until I stop breathing, and it’s comforting to be reminded of that. After I type these last words, I’ll stumble off to the kitchen, make myself salmon with shishito peppers, and watch The Defenders, continuing to lead a motherless life. While I’m writing this, and while reading The Murder at the Vicarage, I’m not motherless. Reading and writing are so much of my inheritance from her that doing those things brings her back. She’s with me, not in a mystical sense, but because she built who I am.

Anyway, The Murder at the Vicarage is a good book, and you should probably read it.