Pebbles in the water

Since my last proper Agatha Christie post, I have read:

• The Man in the Brown Suit - Anne Beddingfield is a lunatic and I love her! The book has elements of Christie's espionage stories but is more of a crime caper with the Big Boss mystery in the middle. I was SO worried that Anne's new friend Mrs. Blair would turn out to be the villain! Anne and Mrs. Blair are such strong, distinct personalities, and it's fascinating how Christie can voice characters well. Shame about all the casual racism against black Africans, woof.


• N or M? - This was a relief to get to next, because I'd read a bunch of Christie's non-murder mysteries in a row, which was a little frustrating. Technically this one is still espionage, but there is a whodunit contained to a single location with a locked cast of characters, so it's functionally like a murder mystery. Also, another Tommy & Tuppence book! I was startled about the time skip, so they're now in their 40s and have adult children and are in a second war, what a time.


• Hallowe'en Party - This was fun! A tragedy of a child’s death at a party after she boasts about having seen a murder, and an investigation years after the fact. I liked the setting, and I figured out some of the elements from the clues themselves, plus I didn’t find Ariadne Oliver as grating as I otherwise sometimes do. The writing/pacing felt really smooth in this one.

After finishing that last one, I vaguely recalled that Branagh's third Poirot movie might've been loosely based on it, so I looked it up and it was, so I watched it!

Surprise surprise, I actually like Branagh's version! Which is HILARIOUS because I thought his Orient Express was just okay, and skipped Death on the Nile entirely (for cast reasons, but when I heard about the moustache's backstory, decided that that was probably a good decision).

Looking back, the problem with Orient Express, I think, was that it was close enough to the book that it made the differences more frustrating, and brought into sharper relief the things that Branagh didn't think were important but I, personally, felt were important, and vice versa. Then Death on Nile looked like more of the same.

A Haunting in Venice however, is a full-on remix, and I think the right way to go! Instead of pretending to be an adaptation, it does its own thing while retaining the broad strokes for some of the characters and some of the specific dynamics, especially ( mild spoilers ) but in a new way that I found legitimately fun. Because it's a remix it's more enjoyable to spot what's been retained and what's been moved around, and it allows (for me, at least) more generosity in parsing this version's new themes, in this case the weight of death and guilt clinging on to the living and not allowing them to move on. (Brought to the most extreme with the murderer, even before the first murder.)

Of course, now that I want Branagh to make another, he's not going to.

Bloody Game's season 2 has been a slog of a watch so I ended up starting Death and Other Details, which was on my list for a while but I forgot about it, and I'm missing Only Murders in the Building so it felt like the right time to check it out? Plus I ended up reading Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party at the same time, so I suppose I'm just in the mood.

I was actually just thinking that I love Only Murders for the characters and the setting, because the whodunits aren't that clever (season 3 being an exception for me, YMMV), and that in general, writing whodunits that can be pieced together satisfyingly is way harder than it looks! So starting Death and Other Details I'm already wincing that it opens with narration to "pay attention to details" because... we do. Murder mystery fans, I mean. Some cinematic/TV takes do the parsing out of details well (The Last of Sheila stands out to me) but it's hard to get us off-guard in a way that we're in on it instead of pulling the rug out.

Anyway Death and Other Details starts like traditional murder mystery but pulls away in the long form when the first two murders are solved by a confession, and there's a greater mystery underneath it that's also linked to a murder that happened before the show starts. Mandy Patinkin is the show's World's Greatest Detective, except the show actually belongs to his assistant/protege/client Imogene -- which I did think is a nice touch. The show does do a bunch of stuff well, including having interesting side characters that gain depth in the long form and some of whom could genuinely be the main characters of their own stories (Teddy and Leila in particular), the locked setting of a cruise ship is nice, and I did like the show's actual throughline which is that memory is flawed and can be difficult to rely on. Though on the flipside, digging through memory is what is used to "solve" the mystery, instead of detectiving (though Agatha Christie makes it look so EASY to combine the both).

( The show didn't stick the landing, though. Spoilers for everything. )

Not the Jules Verne novel, but the pop science book by David Whitehouse that has the subtitle The Remarkable Voyage of Scientific Discovery into the Heart of Our World. It's about what's inside planet Earth: crust, mantel, core, and all the fun stuff that happened to or happens because of these elements, i.e. earthquakes and volcanoes, continental drift, magnetic shielding, and so on. I got this book at a warehouse sale yeaaaars ago.

Fun topic! But the writing is unfortunately awkward. I've read enough pop science books by this point, sometimes in topics that are so far reaching (that book about time and time keeping, for example) yet have a certain flow that works to bring the reader bobbing along gently in the eddies of a topic even as it sometimes swerves in unexpected directions. The book makes attempts to do that, and uses the Jules Verne book as a signpost of sorts as it brings the reader "into" the planet layer by layer, but turns to various asides without warning (sometimes from one paragraph to the next underneath it) that are not brought back into the main narrative in a cohesive way, and the asides are sometimes too long for the actual point they concern the main topic -- especially true for asides of various scientists Whitehouse wants to highlight in the historical discoveries of earthscience. Also, author does not explain a lot of terms he should be explaining! I already know what declination is, for example, but it was harder still to follow certain descriptions, especially when it came to the movement within the mantel and how using seismographs to map the inside works. The author knows his stuff, but needs a better editor.

Anyway, planet earth is weird and has a dynamo inside that is one of the key factors leading the life on this planet. Also its way bigger and deeper than people usually think it is, and in many aspects we know less about it than we do about outer space.

James C. Scott, ( James Scott, resisting dominance )

Agustin Fuentes, Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary: ( not as detailed as I wanted )

Deborah Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History: ( Malthus and corn (and corn laws) )

Jane Marie, Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans: ( The bad kind of MLM )
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: ( in praise of excess )

Douglas Brinkley, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion: ( a big day and its commemoration )

Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War: ( shockingly, it's complicated )

Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think: ( they try things )

Theatre Fandom: Engaged Audiences in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Kirsty Sedgman, Francesca Coppa, & Matt Hills: ( live theater as a fandom source )

Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves: ( he's not wrong or exempt )

Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010: ( foresight that didn't help )

KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing: ( functionality is all )

Ironheart is one of those shows where you can see the seams of events stitched together so that the plot can happen, but the plot itself is so different and daring for an MCU property, that you're (well, I) am rather annoyed that it wasn't served better in the execution. Because wow!

I watched 2.5 episodes, got stressed out, watched the Murderbot finale and gross-cried over that, then after a hangover got back to being stressed by Ironheart all the way to its finale, which has lingered with me after. I think somewhere on Riri's dozenth bad decision (I'm not actually counting) I realized that I hadn't felt this kind of tension while watching an MCU property in a good long while, and bracing myself for the usual MCU-type resolution where the hero gets their upgrade before the final battle, the villain's grey areas are flattened in the final act, and the hero makes the right choice. Ironheart does only one out of three.

Riri gets to be messy, traumatized, selfish, brilliant and distant. Her tunnel vision, though started for noble reasons (to protect her loved ones) has led her to burning bridges and becoming an anti-hero at best, and someone the other Avengers would hunt down to stop. At her lowest point, her love interest is brought to her for the chance to give comfort, and you'd think this is the turning point of Riri's emotional journey, but instead it makes things worse.

The bones are so good, which is why I wish there was more meat on it, especially to dive into Riri's justification of her choices, and the smoothening out of the moments where things happen because they have to (everything with "Joe", honestly). Still, salute for not taking the easiest route in telling a story about Riri.