Review: Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot investigates a triple murder that takes place on a ship taking a tourist trip up the Nile. The murder of an heiress, one of the richest women in Europe, is only the top of the iceberg of intrigue and secrets that obscure the truth and lead to more deaths.

I think that Agatha Christie was at her best when it came to writing novels. Short stories didn't give her as much room to develop the plot and characters in that special subtle way of hers. I particularly liked this story because on the surface it is a mystery but underneath it all it is really a study in human character, the different types and manifestations of love and the role it plays in the lives of people.

Review: Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

Maggie Stiefvater is back with a sequel to last year's Shiver. No spoilers as the book isn't even out in the stores yet but I will tell you that this story is different from the last one. It doesn't have the quietness and the feeling of going with the flow and just being happy in the moment. It has the feeling of anticipation coursing all through it, anticipation of something you don't particularly look forward to but that is going to happen regardless because that's how life is, things happen. It also sets the scene for mystery, so I'm betting your gray cells will get a workout trying to answer all the why's before the last installment is on the shelves.
The characters have more depth to them, they aren't children any more, even if they were already 17-going-on-30. They're young adults making their decisions and choosing their path, even if they have to face the fact that they may be burning bridges in the process. The secondary characters are also multi-dimensional and interesting and they make the reader care about them. They also provide a nice contrasting backdrop for the leads.
What puts these books on my list of favorites is that so much of the story is real, the people, the situations, the consequences. If everything worked out perfectly for everyone all the time it would've been fake and Maggie doesn't write fake. What Maggie does write is real people living real lives with all their beauty and all their ugliness and she's not afraid to put it all out there. Writers who are afraid write rubbish and this is not rubbish, very far from it.
This is the kind of book I'm glad is out there for the young readers. They'll have a chance to read about real tenderness and caring and appreciation and devotion and relationships that aren't flashy and won't end up on the front pages of the social gossip columns or on TV but will make all the difference in the world in the lives of two people.
A word of caution - you will laugh some and you will cry some, so get the tissues ready.

Angelique, Part 2 - The Dirty Underbelly Of Publishing

I've been reading a lot of fan message boards and fan sites about the books and the author and found something that got my hackles up. Turns out that Mme. Golon's publisher and agent were in cahoots to not pay her for her work. Exactly, outrageous. Apparently she has had to take them to court over rights to her own books, litigation lasted for almost two decades and she only recently won the battle and now owns everything she's supposed to own as the author. So this got me thinking, how crooked do people have to be to make a talented writer live hand to mouth for decades while they were benefiting from her work? Because, make no mistake, people are still reading these books and the movies that were filmed based on them are still shown on TV in European countries. How shameless and how low does one have to be to live for years knowing that they've taken away a person's only income and to continue doing it? Hard to even imagine, although, of course, there can never be enough money, right?
Another appalling part is that they apparently took out sections of the last 3 books, had someone else connect the dots and then published the books without even telling the author about it. Why, is what I'd like to know. What could have been in those sections they just could not allow to appear on the page? Hard to imagine there being something so current and volatile for France of 1980s that it couldn't be published in a novel set in the XVII century. Was it that they were lousy? I have trouble believing that an author who's written 10 books in this series alone and has only gotten better with time has all of a sudden deteriorated in her skill and talent on the 11th. May be she's simply gotten bored with it all? May be she did, but then why is the writing like a sinusoid, with some parts gripping and exciting and others so dull you only keep going for the fear of missing something important?
So what do we have now? An 88-year-old lady reworking the existing 13 volumes to contain all the pieces and plot lines that were taken out and getting them released by a different publisher while she's finishing up the last 2 books in the series. I can totally understand her, release the books, make some money and may be ensure a comfortable living for herself and a little something for her children. I just hope we see those last two books and I hope this "author's cut" is good. After all, it has been 25 years since the last book was published. And now my brain comes up with another question: why didn't she write the 2 last books in the last 7 years or so? The battle was won, nobody could take her work away, why not finish? I may never know the answers. But would really like to ;)

The Angelique Series by Anne Golon

When I read these books for the first time I wasn't even in my teens and fell in love with them, despite the good-natured ribbing of my family who doubted the books' literary value. To their credit I kept getting new volumes for birthdays and Christmases as they became available.
Fast forward to 2010 and my acute bouts of homesickness. I kept wishing for some way to reconnect, if you will, and what better way to go back in time than with a multi-volume book series? And so for the last month I've been reading like I used to, during lunch, while waiting in line, for 10 minutes between breakfast and rushing out the door and way too late into the night. I devoured 13 books in a month, some over 500 pages long, and couldn't be happier. For one thing I re-discovered the absolutely amazing historical novels where fact and fiction are blended so seamlessly you never know where one ends and the other begins and where the plot and characters are so beautifully and thoroughly developed that I've been looking up places and people on the web for days now and guess what? They're all real! Another reason for happiness is that there are 2 books at the end of the series I didn't know about and the last one, written decades after the first, shows that the brilliant Anne Golon hasn't lost her touch or interest in her cast of characters. Last, but not least, I was thrilled to find out that 2 more books are coming and now I only hope that the 88-year-old author finishes them and we fans get to spend more time with the heroine who's become so real for us. We know everything will end well because so say the Tarot cards of the two little quakers but how exactly will the Sun King deal with not having his two willful vassals under his red heel? That question hasn't been answered yet and I just can't wait to find out.
I can write more, much more, but as it will not be enough will stop for now. May be later I'll talk some more about things this series has made me think about but right now I just want to tell you to go out and find these books, even though they've been out of print for the longest time, read them and discover the series that just might be impossible to categorize as a single-genre creation because it is history, adventure and romance all in one. What it is not is mediocre erotica the covers suggest it is. I would really like to know who designed those and what in the world were they thinking....

The Count of Monte Cristo and other books-turned-movies

Growing up this was one of my favourite books, thrilling me with romance and adventure and taking me to lands far away and times long gone. I read it in the middle of the night with a flashlight under my blanket listening for the sound of my parents coming to take the book away in just as I was getting to the most interesting part. Every new page was 'the most interesting part' of course. 
When the DVD came in the mail I wanted to savour it and wondered if it would be anywhere near as exciting as my memories of the book. It was more exciting actually, what with the chases and duels added on as is often done to make the story more dynamic onscreen, and I was glad that my memories were so old, otherwise I would've bucked at all the twisting of the plot to accommodate the medium. I still gripped the armrest of the couch during Dantes' last fight with Mondego, so no harm done.  
I wonder though about adapting books to accommodate a different media and the effect the adaptation has on the story. Oftentimes characters, scenes and subplots are added or removed in the process, things we would usually have to figure out on our own are right there on the screen in the blink of an eye and the suspense and the thrill of figuring out a character's secret are gone. There's no time for subtleties and more often than not we get a nuance-less story that doesn't do much to benefit the reputation of source material. 
Another aspect I wonder about is what it does for the audience of such an adaptation. Die-hard fans notice discrepancies right away and omissions of their favourite moments leave a sour aftertaste, robbing them of some of the enjoyment of the film as an entertainment product. Those who are exposed to the story for the first time don't know any different and form opinions based on what they see on the screen and what if the movie is only 'based' on the book and has little in common with it besides the names of characters? They may hate the film and never read the masterpiece that inspired it. And those who watch the movie for the value of ultra-condensed Cliff's Notes of the Cliff's Notes that doesn't require turning the pages don't get even a third of what's out there and most likely will never realize that they've been short-changed and that they did it to themselves. 
I don't blame the motion picture and television industries for not putting everything that's in the book in the movie. There's simply not enough time for that and the medium doesn't allow for the same effect as what the written word is capable of creating. I do however blame ourselves for being lazy and not reading more, for not training ourselves to use our imaginations and see books as more than a collection of pages with black characters on them. I blame ourselves for not teaching our children to see beyond the glowing screens in front of them or bypass them entirely even for just a couple of hours a day. 
It's not just bitterness though. I also have hope. Hope that with the widening array of electronic readers populating the market we'll go back to reading more, especially since it won't involve lugging around heavy volumes and the draw of a screen with buttons to assist in navigation will be satisfied. I am one of those constantly-plugged-in myself and my nook is coming tomorrow. I've already saved a ton of books on my computer in preparation for its delivery and am ready to forget where I put the remote. But that's a subject for another post.