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Olga Tokarczuk – Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead | Review

Title: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Author: Olga Tokarczuk

Category: Fiction

Page Count: 272

Rating: 4.5/5

This is potentially a late entry into my list of favourite books of the year, and so I’m definitely glad that I picked it up. I think I heard about it from BookTube, although I can’t remember where I first saw it. I mentioned it to my girlfriend in passing and then she grabbed me a copy for Christmas, and it turned out that Charlie Heathcote was reading it at the same time, so we did a buddy read.

It’s a Polish book that’s been translated, a sort of noir-ish literary fiction murder mystery, and it has some deep takes on life and philosophy that we can all learn from. It’s one of those rare books with a delicious mouth feel where for me at least, it was just a pleasure to read all of the way through. I didn’t want it to stop, but I guess eventually and inevitably, it had to.

If you’re looking for philosophical fiction with a poetic feel, you’re in luck. It also scores a few diversity points if that’s your thing, being written by a woman and originally in Polish. But those are all little bonuses, the icing on a delicious cake that I’m super glad I heard about.

I have no idea whether Charlie liked it as much as I did, but I’m sure he’ll be posting about it on Goodreads and on his BookTube channel, so you can find out there. Enjoy!

Learn more about Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

Agatha Christie – Towards Zero | Review

Title: Towards Zero

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 192

Rating: 3.25/5

This book is one of Christie’s Inspector Battle books, and I’ve always found them to be a little weaker than the Marple and Poirot books, as well as just her general standalones. Unfortunately, Battle just isn’t a particularly gripping character, and so when he’s front and centre in one of Christie’s books, it’s a bit of a struggle.

I think part of the problem here was that the mystery itself also wasn’t particularly interesting, and so that left me just reading for the sake of reading even though the story and the characters were of only passing interest. I mean, it’s still alright, just not great.

Still, I should caveat this with what I always say about Agatha Christie, which is that even a bad Agatha Christie book is better than a good book by most other authors. It’s just a shame that I left this one until towards the end, because I was kind of hoping to go out on a high. And now I only have two more of her books left.

Learn more about Towards Zero.