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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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Stieg Larsson – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo | Review

Title: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Author: Stieg Larsson

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 538

Rating: 9/10

Stieg Larsson – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I’m not sure how this book managed to pass me by – I’ve only just got round to reading it, way after it became a cultural phenomenon and the movie came out. That’s because I picked up my copy of it for free, after my ex-housemate moved out and left a load of books behind. You also see this all over the place in charity shops, so if you spot a copy of it then you should grab it, if you can.

This is the first book in Larsson’s Millenium trilogy, which was published posthumously after Larsson’s untimely death. In it, we follow the exploits of Mikael Blomkvist, the editor of a magazine called Millennium, after he takes on some freelance work to investigate the disappearance of the daughter of a rich industrialist. All sorts of shenanigans follow.

What’s interesting about this book is the way in which multiple different subplots all come together and relate to each other. Larsson weaves the past and the present together into a mystery which spans multiple generations, and Blomkvist and his co-investigator, the titular girl with the dragon tattoo, a girl called Lisbeth Salander, make a decent team.

Stieg Larsson

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has something of a reputation – a lot of people consider it to be a bit too grim and gritty, but I didn’t think it was too bad. It’s on the gritty side for something that crossed over into the mainstream, but there are other books out there that take things to a much deeper level. That said, you’re still going to come across rape, incest and murder, and so it’s not exactly a light read, especially if you’re not used to this sort of thing.

As for me, I thought it was a competently-written thriller with plenty of twists and turns to keep you going along the way, and it was also expertly translated. The tell-tale sign of a bad novel is if it makes you stop every now and then as you try to reconcile a problem with the book with the flow of your imagination. That doesn’t happen, here – Larsson keeps you turning the pages over and over until you ht the end.

Now, if you do decide to read this book then you should bear in mind that it’s going to take you a reasonably long time to finish it – there are a lot of pages, and the print is pretty small. Don’t worry if it doesn’t feel like you’re making progress, because you are – progress might be slow at first, but once you get absorbed into the story, which you will do, then you’ll find it hard to put down and before you know it, you’ll be hitting the climactic ending.

As for the ending itself, there were still plenty of twists and turns coming even after Blomkvist discovered what actually happened and brought the culprit to justice. It also sets you up perfectly for the second book in the series – I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking forward to getting stuck into it sometime soon.