[ad_1]
Probably the most pleasant choices I made this 12 months was to declare a “summer time of snob.” For just a few gloriously sizzling and sunny months, my fiction (and typically nonfiction) studying was loosely organized across the theme of snobbery. Crazy heiresses, high-society murders and sophistication nervousness galore populated my studying record, giving simply sufficient of a thematic by way of line to offer fascinating comparisons with out changing into repetitive or boring.
So I’m going to do one thing comparable this winter, and decide up a murder-mystery theme for the subsequent month or two. It’s a style that I discover psychologically comforting, as a result of homicide mysteries exist in ordered, if violent universes: Unhealthy individuals do unhealthy issues in them, however they don’t get away with it. That makes for a pleasing departure from our far-less-tidy actuality.
I suppose I actually embarked upon this theme just a few weeks in the past. I’ve been watching “A Homicide On the Finish of the World,” a miniseries from Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij that looks as if what you’d get in the event you cross-pollinated “Glass Onion” with “The Lady With the Dragon Tattoo.” It’s basically a country-house homicide thriller up to date for the A.I. period, however to date it’s not fairly cozy sufficient for me. (Too many shiny billionaires, too few goofy eccentrics.) Nonetheless, I’ll watch the ultimate two installments to see the place it’s all going — the foreshadowing that All Is Not As It Appears has been so heavy that I shall be amused if the massive twist seems to be that it was petty, low-tech human jealousy all alongside.
Alternatively, “The Enchantment,” by Janice Hallett, which is ready in an English village’s newbie theater troupe, is as cozy as they arrive. And its Christmas-themed sequel, described as a “festive homicide thriller,” sounds prefer it dials the comfortable issue as much as 11. It’s on my record.
After all, it’s potential to take coziness — thriller or in any other case — a bit too far. Dorothy Parker, famously, objected to A.A. Milne’s saccharine prose in “The Home At Pooh Nook,” writing in her evaluation that “Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.” However “The Purple Home Thriller,” Milne’s tackle the country-estate homicide style, is way lighter on the bumbling anthropomorphized bears, and in addition a whole lot of enjoyable. It ought to let you know one thing that Raymond Chandler, who presumably abjured cuddliness in all its types, was a fan of the ebook.
Reader responses: Books that you simply suggest
George Fleming, a reader in Mount Vernon, Ohio, recommends “The Earl of Louisiana” by A.J. Liebling:
A tremendously entertaining ebook and a whole clarification of human nature. One for the ages.
Jill Berke, a reader in Miami Seaside, Fla., recommends “Do No Hurt” by Henry Marsh:
The creator, a British neurosurgeon, takes us inside his thoughts and palms as chapter by chapter he explains particular circumstances affecting the mind. How he decides to function and what happens every time he components a cranium to see the mind is a compassionate, trustworthy lesson find the steadiness between actuality and hope for his sufferers. It’s a spot all of us inhabit after we are medically accountable for a cherished one or put together for our personal dying. Studying this superbly written ebook made me much less fearful to discover that steadiness and extra aware of the lure of denial.
What are you studying?
Thanks to everybody who wrote in to inform me about what you’re studying. Please maintain the submissions coming!
I wish to hear about issues you may have learn (or watched or listened to) that you simply suggest to Interpreter readers. That may very well be a specific favourite from this 12 months, a ebook that modified your thoughts about one thing, or a favourite thriller that you simply assume needs to be on my record.
[ad_2]
Source link
