What I finished:+
Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie. Recced by
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scripsi, this is a very solid Christie with an interesting exploration of emotional abuse. There's no particular reason it needs to be set in the Levant and feature people visiting Petra--it could have been set literally anywhere outside the US--but it adds some nice color. The downside is the egregious amount of fatphobia and the weirdness of Christie writing about a pre-1948 Palestinian character as being antisemitic (I can't even BEGIN to unpack this), but otherwise a good Christie!
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Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester. This is an Erik Larson-style account of the largest volcanic explosion of modern times, which took place on a tiny volcanic island in between Sumatra and Java and killed tens of thousands of people. It was also one of the first major disasters that took place after the whole world was connected via underwater telegraph tables, so it became a worldwide phenomenon in a way that previous disasters had not.
The reason I say it's Larson-style is that it's cultural history, natural history, history of natural history, etc. all interwoven together. The major differences are that a) Larson tends to go back and forth between the different strands on a chapter-by-chapter basis, essentially creating a braid, and you never spend too much time on the "these are the mechanics of how this natural disaster happened" before getting back to people you care about, whereas Winchester divides his into chunks so you're kind of stuck with one topic until it's over and then you get to move onto a new one, and b) Larson is just a more engaging writer. Which is not to say that Winchester
isn't an engaging writer, but the immediacy of Larson's writing that makes something like
Isaac's Storm so suspenseful isn't nearly as strong with Winchester.
I've seen some people complaining on GoodReads that it focuses too much on the context and not enough on the explosion itself, but that doesn't particularly bother me.
My actual complaints are three-fold:
a) the GoodReads people are right in that there should have been
more about the actual explosion and its aftermath. I like having all that context, but it shouldn't cut into the actual meat of the story. The aftermath in particular gets short-shrift, other than a chapter about how the explosion possibly contributed to an up-swelling of Islam-inspired nationalism in the decades afterwards. But Winchester is not the person I want to read that particular account from!
b) everything is super white-people-centric. I realize that the majority of the sources he had access to are in European-languages. But presumably he doesn't speak Dutch, and yet he drew on a number of Dutch sources, so he clearly
knows how to get information from sources in languages he doesn't speak. Which makes the lack of it in non-European languages really egregious. Frankly, if you refuse to do the same for other languages, perhaps you are not the right person to write this particular book? I simply do not believe that an event of this magnitude that happened in the late 19th century wasn't written about in languages other than English and Dutch. There might not have been nearly as much out there in various Indonesian languages, for instance, but surely some of it had to exist! I really feel like it's incumbent upon someone telling this particular story to
find those sources and make much of them.
c) Winchester seems to think that colonialism was not that bad, actually? He's really clear that certain parts of the Dutch colonial project
were that bad, but he seems to think that once those were changed, then the Indonesians didn't have much to complain about. He doesn't ever
say this, it's just a vibe I got. I could be wrong about it, but I kind of doubt it.
But the story itself was interesting, and I particularly appreciated the chapters about how all the amateur meteorologists all over the world gathered data that showed the effects the explosion had--that was so cool! I knew nothing about Krakatoa, so I actually did learn a lot, but I wish someone else had written this book.
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The Red Door by Charles Todd. The premise of the Ian Rutledge series is that it's 1919/1920, he's back from the Somme with major PTSD and even more major survivor's guilt, fresh out of a mental institution, and trying to lose himself in his work at Scotland Yard. We travel around the UK with him as he investigates various things while trying to keep his grip on his sanity. I like this series because it's well-written and not fluffy; so many historical mystery series are just so cozy, and I do not want cozy in my mysteries. It definitely has that heavy sense of "we just watched an entire generation of young men be destroyed for absolutely nothing and now we are living in a death-haunted world" that I want in my post-WWI stories.
This particular offering had a very unique premise: a well-respected man just...disappears in London. Nobody knows where he's gone, but his family is definitely lying to Rutledge about something. Meanwhile in the north, there's a seemingly-unrelated murder, and Rutledge finds himself bouncing back and forth between these places, trying to prove that they're related.
Somebody complained in a GoodReads review that there's too much of him driving back and forth, and I am like, "Friend, have you read any of the books in this series so far?" That's like complaining that Ben January isn't getting enough rest. It's just part of the setup of the series.
But yeah, this was a good one.
What I'm reading now: I shockingly haven't started anything new yet! Yesterday was Juneteenth so I was off work and I basically lay around napping and reading fanfic all day. Probably I'll start something new tonight, and we will see what I am in the mood for then.
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