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Agatha Christie – An Autobiography | Review

Title: An Autobiography

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 560

Rating: 4*/5

Agatha Christie – An Autobiography

Wow, this was pretty epic. I mean, it’s a long old book based on just the page count alone, but it’s also super dense with tiny writing and hardly any gaps between the different pages. That means that it takes a huge time investment if you want to get through it and if you have the same edition that I do, you’re also going to need some decent lighting.

This also isn’t the book for you unless you’re a serious Agatha Christie fan. That’s because by its very nature, we spend a lot of time learning about Christie’s early life and her personal life, which really won’t mean much to you unless you want to find out more about what makes her tick. It also places much less focus on her individual books than I was expecting, although that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, we get to see how Christie saw herself, and that’s not necessarily as a novelist. It took her a long time to realise that she could be a writer by profession.

We also don’t get to see what happened when she famously went missing, although that’s hardly a surprise because she said in interviews that she wasn’t too sure herself. But the good news is that Christie’s writing is so entrancing, as it always is, that she could be talking about absolutely anything and it wouldn’t matter. As it is, she talks a lot about the society that she lived in and covers everything from the effects of the two World Wars to what the family unit looked like back in the early half of the 20th century.

Agatha Christie

Christie was also something of an adventurer, travelling around to Syria and Iraq, flying in an aeroplane less than ten years after the Wright brothers demonstrated their first powered flight and even becoming one of the first English women to go surfing. She really lived a remarkably full life and this book is the result of that all. Sure, it pretty much comes to a stop after the end of the Second World War and misses out much of her later life, but then it would have been a massive book it had kept on going and it was already published posthumously as is.

My enjoyment of this book was also boosted by the fact that I buddy read it with a BookTube friend of mine called Bookslikewoah. She’s been doing “Project Poirot” and reading a bunch of Agatha Christie for that, and so it’ll be interesting to see what she makes of it. We’re both big Agatha Christie fans and the perfect audience for a book like this. As to whether I’d recommend it to my mum? Probably not, and she’s a big fan of Agatha Christie and detective/crime novels too.

All in all then, I really enjoyed reading this book and I feel super accomplished because I finished it. I feel like I got to know Christie a lot more, but I also feel as though this background information will help me to get more from her other books when I get to them. I’m also glad I read it because this was the single biggest obstacle to stop me from reading her entire bibliography.

Agatha Christie Quote

Click here to buy An Autobiography.

Peter James – Billionaire | Review

Title: Billionaire

Author: Peter James

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 322

Rating: 3*/5

Peter James – Billionaire

This book is one of the oldest books in James’ bibliography, and it’s definitely a product of the times in which it was written – as the author himself admins in his introduction. It’s actually a reasonably well-written book, and certainly a sign of things to come – but at the same time, it feels old-fashioned.

There’s also the fact that it isn’t a crime novel, which is what James is most well-known for. Instead, it’s sort of a cross between an espionage novel and a thriller based on money and power, and the story line follows a man called Rocq who gets into an awkward situation involving gold and coffee stocks. It’s pretty confusing if you’re not into politics and the way that the world works – but with the added complexity of it being based on the way the world worked in the 1980s.

Overall, I wouldn’t say that this was a bad book – it just wasn’t as good as his others. It’s also not the kind of genre that I’d usually read – I find that a lot of spy thrillers are pretty much the same, and this one didn’t do much to make itself stand out. In fact, by the time that I reached the end of it, I’d already forgotten half of the things that happened along the way.

Really, you’re only going to love this book if you’re a big fan of the genre of writing, and I don’t think it has a huge amount of mainstream appeal. I read at least a hundred books per year, and this one’s the type that would be about bang in the middle if I were to list them in order of how much I enjoyed them. Because of that, I’d recommend reading one of Peter James’ Roy Grace books before giving this one a go.