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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

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George R. R. Martin – A Clash of Kings | Review

Title:A Clash of Kings

Author: George R. R. Martin

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 742

Rating: 9/10

George R. R. Martin – A Clash of Kings

A Clash of Kings is the second book in George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire. You might be more familiar with it as Game of Thrones, especially if you watch the TV show.

I explained in my review for the first book in the series that I’ve been holding back on watching the TV show until after I’ve read the books. It’s a policy that seems to be serving me well, and whilst I have read, watched and enjoyed the first season (and the first book), I haven’t watched any further. I have, however, read the book, and whilst it wasn’t as mind-blowing as the first book in the series, it was still pretty damn good.

What’s interesting here is the character development – you start to learn a little bit more about some of the characters that you were introduced in the first book, and some of them, like Theon Greyjoy, develop so much here that they’re almost unrecognisable. I can’t tell you too much about that, though – I don’t want to ruin the surprises for you, and rest assured that there are plenty of them for you to discover along the way.

George R.R. Martin

We also meet some new characters, and we see a lot more of the Baratheon brothers, Renly and Stannis. In fact, this book takes its title from the fact that there are four different kings who are all claiming the realm, and a large part of the action takes place on the battlefield as different armies march against each other in increasingly bizarre confrontations, including at one one point when Renly and Stannis march against each other, instead of turning their forces towards King’s Landing, and the Lannisters.

A Clash of Kings is still a top quality novel, and certainly up there with the best high fantasy on the market, but I could only give it a 9/10 because there’s just something about it that made it not seem as gripping as the first book, which I awarded a 10/10. That said, A Clash of Kings is still a mindblowing read, and definitely worth the time investment that it’ll take you to get through the pages. You’d be crazy not to read them in order, though.

One of the more interesting aspects to this book is that because there’s so much warfare, you get to learn more about the different flags and banners for the main houses. In the same way that the wolf sigil of House Stark and the lion of the Lannisters are symbolic, so are the other sigils, and learning more about them gives you a chance to delve deeper into Martin’s world. There’s also a handy appendix at the end which tells you more about each house, including their sigils and standards and the key players in their households.

George R. R. Martin and Peter Dinklage

At the time of writing, I’m on to the third book in the series, which is split into two parts – I’m on part one. It’s already clear to me that A Clash of Kings was an important book in the development of the history of Westeros – Martin continues to build on what happens here, and it’s here, about half way through A Clash of Kings, that he pours gasoline onto the fire and the plot really starts to take off.

And Martin writes in a trademark style that sets his work apart from his contemporaries, which makes his work a lot of fun to read through. As for me, I’ve read about 2,000 pages of his work in just over a month, and I’m not going to get bored of him any time soon. I can see why people always rave about Game of Thrones – it’s a cracking television series, and an even better series of books.

For me, it’s a no-brainer – if you like fantasy, or if you like good fiction in general, then you’re going to enjoy A Clash of Kings just as much as you’ll enjoy any of the other books in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Sure, it takes a huge time commitment, but it’s worth it – you’ll be absorbing a piece of popular culture, and discovering a whole new world along the way. So go out and buy not just this book, but all the books in the series.