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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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David Kirby – Animal Factory | Review

Title: Animal Factory

Author: David Kirby

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 494

Rating: 4*/5

David Kirby – Animal Factory

I have mixed feelings about this one. I guess I should start by explaining why I read this book in the first place. That’d be because I’m writing a novel that’s set on a factory farm – or a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) as they prefer to be known – and so I read this book as part of my research. I needed to learn as much as I could about how factory farms operate so that I could capture their evils in what’s essentially a political horror novel.

The issue here is that it’s long and fairly repetitive, and it really just follows the stories of several different activists as they repeatedly file legislation. It doesn’t really take us inside the farms as such, focusing more on the excrement that they pour into rivers and which causes the locals to suffer some serious adverse effects. We’re talking death, here. People die because of CAFOs, and yet most people turn a blind eye.

Still, this might not be the best book to read unless you’re heavily involved in the field, and it’s not really a decent introduction into what actually goes inside the facilities. It’s more like a prolonged anecdote, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll feel your interest starting to wane even if you are using it as research for an exciting new novel.

Factory Farm

On the plus side, nobody could argue that it isn’t thorough. The author has clearly put a lot of effort into his research and he’s also undeniably passionate about the subject. I had to give it a 4/5 instead of a 3/5 quite simply because there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fine. It’s just not amazing. And when you’re starting to read a 500 page piece of non-fiction, you damn well want to make sure that it’s going to be worth your while before you invest the time.

This book, then, probably isn’t the book that will appeal to regular readers and turn CAFOs and factory farms into a subject that everyone in the country has an informed opinion on. It’s more of a specialist read, but it will at least offer some comfort to people who are facing a new facility that’s popped up or is threatening to pop up near to their homes and workplaces.

But it doesn’t really matter whether this book is specialist or not, because ultimately if you do decide to read it then the author is preaching to the converted. If you don’t give a damn about where your food comes from, you’re unlikely to care enough to research it. It’s a shame really, because it’s the ignorant people who most need to read it.

It is what it is. If you’re happy to invest a lot of time reading about litigation and the like then this book’s for you. If not, don’t bother. Try something else.