I’m thinking that this is now going to be a monthly blog rather than a weekly one, as I’m spending so much time reading for the Silver Birch committee and so little time reading for my own pleasure. And this will be a quick post because it’s late and I’ve had a long day.
Two weeks ago I read The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie for my friends book club meeting, where we were each supposed to read something by the Queen of Crime. I chose this book because it was a stand-alone, neither a Hercules Poirot novel nor a Miss Marple one. It told the story of a young woman in England in the 1920s who, after her sole parent passes away, finds herself longing for adventure amid the offers of marriage to respectable older men and secretarial posts from which she beat a hasty retreat. When she decides to go off on an adventure to Africa following an unusual encounter on the subway platform involving a man in a brown suit and a subsequent murder at a nearby house for let, she finds herself in the centre of a mystery with many possible suspects and potential dangers, an environment in which she thrives. Although it was definitely outdated and the plucky heroine was a bit too “Nancy Drew” for me, it was still an enjoyable and quick read. Too bad I was not feeling well and had to miss the meeting - I’m curious what the others thought of their books and the author.
And in between reading juvenile and young adult books, I also reread Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg following a discussion I had with a friend. We were talking about Greenland and he commented that he’d never seen the movie, nor had he read the book, and so we decided to read it at the same time and have a “two-person book club”. He started yesterday and I finished this morning, and I can’t wait to discuss it with him. I’ve both read the book and seen the movie before, many years ago, so I sort of remembered the story, but I’m curious to hear how it was for a first-timer. If anyone doesn’t know this story, it focuses on the main character, thirty-seven-year-old Smilla, a native Greenlander who was moved to Denmark and sent to boarding school when she was a young girl after the death of her mother. At the start of the book, Smilla’s six-year-old neighbour, Isaiah, has fallen from the roof of their building and has died. This was deemed an accident, but after going up to the roof and examining the footprints in the snow, Smilla determines that he was not playing and that it was not, in fact, an accident. Estranged from her father and having no one to confide in, she seeks answers on her own, putting herself at considerable risk but also drawing on her deep traditional knowledge from her years in Greenland about snow, ice, the sea currents, and weather in general. She eventually begins to form a relationship with another tenant in the building, the mechanic, who appears to be another solitary type, but she does most of the investigating on her own. She becomes more deeply entrenched in a labyrinthine plan involving many shady characters, and nothing is as it seems, until she begins to wonder who she can trust and if she’ll be able to get out alive. I loved this book and movie, which I read and saw back in the 1990s, and it did not disappoint upon rereading. I remember thinking, “How does she know what all this means and how can she come up with such amazing ways to foil the plans of the villains?”, and I had this very same thought this time around. This novel reminded me of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larssen (I’ve seen both film versions, but have never read the book), in that they both describe complex mysteries and have kick-ass heroines. I would recommend this novel to anyone who is interested in Denmark-Greenland history, Danish noir mysteries, or complex psychological and environmental thrillers. I actually went back into my previous posts to see if I’d already written about this book, which I hadn’t, but what I found was a mention of this book in reference to another book, White Heat, by Canadian author M J McGrath, the first in the “Edie Kiglatuk” series. I also read The Boy in the Snow, and have just discovered that there’s a third book in this series that I haven’t read, The Bone Seeker, which I just put on hold at the library.
That’s all for tonight. Take advantage of the longer daylight hours, which makes for more reading time in the evenings!
Bye for now… Julie
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