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Agatha Christie – The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding | Review

Title: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 368

Rating: 3.5/5

This isn’t Agatha Christie’s finest work, but it’s still worth reading if you’re an aficionado, especially if you actually pick it up around Christmas like I did. It’s only really the title story that’s actually Christmas-themed, but I did think it was a pretty good one with a few different surprises in store.

Most of the other stories were only so-so, but I did enjoy Greenshaw’s Folly, the only one of these stories to feature Miss Marple instead of Hercule Poirot. Poirot is fine, but he’s not my favourite. He was actually okay in these stories, but I don’t think the cases themselves were the most intriguing. I actually forgot a couple of them as soon as I read them, although there were a few good ones too.

Another standout for me was The Mystery of the Spanish Chest, in part because I felt like I’d read something similar to it before. It’s always hard to tell with Christie (and even Conan Doyle) because they’ve been imitated so many times by so many different people that it can be hard to tell whether they created the clichés or whether they fell into them.

I was actually talking about this with my Uncle Carl because he’s a big Christie fan himself. I’ve been trying to pick up every book she ever wrote and some of them were only published in America. That means that some of the stories are duplicated or even included in different versions.

All in all then, this is a decent enough collection to read if you like short stories and if you’re a fan of Hercule Poirot. If you’re more of a Marple fan like I am, you may be better off going for something like Miss Marple’s Final Cases, which I thought was fantastic. Those short stories showed off Christie at her finest, whereas these ones feel more average, if such a term can be applied to Christie’s oeuvre. And this book was still pretty good, it just wasn’t anywhere near her best. So yeah.

Click here to buy The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding.

Terry Pratchett – Moving Pictures | Review

Title: Moving Pictures

Author: Terry Pratchett

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 336

Rating: 7/10

Terry Pratchett – Moving Pictures

Alas, moving pictures didn’t move me as much as some of Sir Terry Pratchett’s other books, and I think that in many ways, it’s probably my own fault. Last time that I read it, I was probably too young to pick up on a lot of the references, because this book features the Discworld’s version of Hollywood. It’s a bit like Soul Music, in that respect – it takes a lot of inspiration from stuff that a kid wouldn’t know, not now and not then.

That said, I don’t think you should judge the book too harshly based on my review – if you’re a film afficionado, or if you’re in your thirties or above, then you’re probably going to know what Pratchett is talking about. It probably also helps if you’re a fan of some of the more eldritch stuff to happen in the series – yeah, that’s right, I just dropped the word ‘eldritch’ into a sentence. Not sure if I spelled it right, though.

Anyway, there are some redeeming features to the novel, like the fact that despite it being the tenth Discworld novel, it still appeared relatively early in terms of Pratchett’s publishing history, although at least I was alive for this one. It’s also the first book to feature Mustrum Ridcully, a man who would go on to become one of my favourite characters – I like it when people are fallible, and Ridcully is definitely fallible, despite his seniority.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend starting with Moving Pictures unless you’re a serious film fan, but it is a necessary addition to your library if you’re working on reading every book in the Discworld series. I’d be interested to see whether you agree with me, when you do read it – I have the feeling that the low score is because of my own imperfections, and not because of any imperfections in the book. Let me know, folks!