“It could be much better, I saw that . . . ” — Agatha Christie about The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Agatha Christie is the Julia Child of murder mysteries, always with the self-deprecation!
Stay tuned.
Tag: biographies
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Book # 3 of self’s 2023 Reading Year is a new biography of Agatha Christie: Agatha Christie, An Elusive Woman.
Whatever is old is new again.
Self found the movie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile extremely entertaining.
Chapter 10, Love and Death, is about Christie’s first marriage, to a dashing member of the Royal Flying Corps named Archie Christie. Alas, the pilots (including Archie) were ill-prepared for WWI.
The British had inferior machines and training, and were losing four times as many planes as the Germans. Pilots arrived in France with fewer and fewer hours of experience. One newcomer to Archie’s base was asked how much time he’d logged.
“Fourteen hours. Fourteen hours! It’s absolutely disgraceful to send pilots overseas with so little flying. You don’t stand a chance . . . Another fifty hours and you might be quite decent; but fourteen! My God, it’s murder!”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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Had they been able to read his Diary, some at least would have marvelled at the achievement of a man observing himself with scientific curiosity, as he voyaged through the strange seas of his own life.
— Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, p. 252 -
The best way to know a city is to walk it. And here is a particular walk that Samuel Pepys took on his inspections of various shipyards (for his work):
He very often walked along the south bank of the river, into Redriff (now Rotherhithe), and on through the meadows and orchards and meadows to Deptford, Greenwich and even Woolwich. He enjoyed walking, and adjacent countryside were so little frequented that he often read a book as he followed the familiar grassy footpaths, breaking off to find stiles. You can take this route today through housing estates, past grimy churches and scraps of garden and over the foully polluted River Ravensbourne, your imagination struggling to clean up and empty the world as you go. The river was unembanked then, and at low tide a wide beach appeared. There is still a Cherry Garden Pier marking where he bought cherries in the orchards close to the river, and an inn at the water’s edge between Southwark and Rotherhithe on the spot where he often stopped for a drink. The fifteenth-century tower of St. Nicholas’s Church also remains at Deptford, where skulls grin over the churchyard gate. The green hill of Greenwich, rising solidly before you as you round the loop of the river, has changed little in three hundred years, and for Pepys this was one of the most familiar views in his working life.
— Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, p. 136It is so lovely to think of this layering of history over physical space, and London continues to be my favorite city because of these kinds of twinned pleasures.
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1661 England coming out of the Cromwell era reminds self so much of the world as it slowly emerges from years of pandemic lockdown:
There were also the newly opened theatres, which he found irresistible, with their repertoire of Elizabethan and Jacobean masterpieces, their many adaptations from the Spanish and the French, new works by Dryden and D’Avenant, and ambitious scenery. Throughout 1661, he went two or three times a week to either the King’s Company, managed by Thomas Killigrew, wit and courier, or the Duke’s, under D’Avenant. In January he saw a woman onstage for the first time . . .
— Samuel Pepys, The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin, p. 133 -
In preparing to keep a journal he was giving himself a task, and his temperament and training meant he was going to take the task seriously . . . even if he had no idea what he might achieve, he appears to have seen himself as a man who might do something in the world. Without his enthusiasm for himself, the Diary would hardly have begun to take shape as it did.
He was a passionate reader and cared for good writing. He had already tried his hand as a novelist and discovered a flair for reporting history in the making. Like many others, Pepys started off wanting to write something without quite knowing what it was, and the Diary could be a way of finding out. He may have seen it as a source book for something grander to be undertaken later. The high drama of the world in which he had grown up, the still continuing conflict between republic and monarchy, the heroic figures set against one another, paralleled the conflicts of the ancient world he had studied in classical texts. And principally, there was his curiosity about himself, which made him see his own mental and physical nature as not merely a legitimate but a valuable and glorious subject for exploration.
— Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin, p. 79Claire Tomalin, wow. Just wow.
This is a re-read. The first time she read it, she was on her way to Berlin to give a reading. She had it on her lap the whole flight, but it turned out her seatmate was a young Finnish architect who was going home after making a bid on behalf of his architectural firm for a building in Beijing. He ended up explaining Berlin to her, making little drawings on her notebook: here’s the Brandenburg gate, here’s Oranienstrasse, this street has the best Turkish food, etc.
She remembered being amazed, not just by Berlin, but by the book. Who knows why she decided to re-read it now (motives will be examined, later, in her journal, lol). She didn’t expect her re-read to evoke the same spark of excitement that it did on first read, 15 years (!) ago, but for some reason the above passage read really fresh.
(To be continued)
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K: A Novel, by Ted O’Connell (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2020)
Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2011)
Like Water and Other Stories, by Olga Zilberbourg (WTAW Press, 2019)
Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, by John Weir (Red Hen Press, 2022)
The Accomplice, by Joseph Kanon (Atria Books, 2019)
How High We Go In the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu (William Morrow, 2022)
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Self will aim to read 38 books.
Her 2022 Reading Challenge was 37 books, and she overshot that by a mile. Well, just by 11 books. But it is only November.
Here are her five-star reads, so far 2022:
- K: A Novel, by Ted O’Connell
- Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
- Circe, by Madeline Miller
- Like Water and Other Stories, by Olga Zilberbourg
- Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me: Stories, by John Weir
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There should be an Apple museum somewhere in the world. Or maybe the stores are the museums. Dunno, but this paragraph, which is in the chapter describing how the iPod came to be, is blowing self’s mind. (Oh, you didn’t know self was alternating between Adrian Tchaikovsky’s space opera Eyes of the Void and Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs? Well now you know!)
The most Zen of all simplicities was Jobs’s decree, which astonished his colleagues, that the iPod would not have an on-off switch. It became true of most Apple devices. There was no need for one. Apple’s devices would go dormant if they were not being used, and they would wake up when you touched any key. But there was no need for a switch that would go “Click — you’re off. Good-bye.”
— Steve jobs, by walter isaacson, chapter thirty: the digital hub: from the itunes to the ipodSelf had to type the citation for the above quote “blind.” She couldn’t see what she was typing: it was being blocked by the “+” sign of the “add block” function. Great design there, WordPress! She finally got it right, with no mis-spellings, but it took about six tries.
Block editing is so clunky. Hate it. Self can just imagine what Steve Jobs would say. Whoever dreamed up the transition to block editing for WordPress was NO designer.
Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 