2009 January 03 » Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog

Challenge: The Baker Street Challenge

Posted by Anastasia on January 3, 2009 No Responses »

Jan 032009

bakerst1501 Sherlock Holmes reading challenge? Hell yeah!

The Rules

1. Choose a goal from the reading tier below and add your name to the sign up page.

2. The challenge will run from January 1 to December 31, 2009. You can sign up for the challenge at any time before December 31, 2009.

2. You do not have to choose your books in advance. You may change your reading list at any point in the challenge.

3. Overlapping with other challenges is fine.

4. Audio books and eBooks are allowed.

5. Feel free to post reviews or general thoughts about your reading to the Baker Street Challenge blog. Please e-mail me at ruth [at] bookishruth [dot] com to be added as a contributor.

I am super excited about this. I wanted to read the Holmes stories again, plus branch out into some of the pastiches, so this challenge is the perfect motivator for me.

I am going to read 7 books, at least three of them canon. List of books read is under the jump.
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Review: The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie (1922)

Posted by Anastasia on January 3, 2009 No Responses »

Jan 032009

christieetext98secad10 The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
Publication: ManyBooks.net ebook, 219 pages, originally published 1922
Genre: Mystery
Rating: 4.5/5
Download or read online @ ManyBooks.net

Summary from ManyBooks.net:

Set in 1919, young couple Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley form a partnership, hiring themselves out as ”young adventurers”. Their first case, however, is more of an adventure than they expect – working to find documents that, if they were known to the general public, would fuel a communist revolution in Britain.

I didn’t really have any expectations for this, mostly because I’m only familar with Christie’s Poirot books and not much else. However, I was immensely satisfied to discover that this is a truly excellent book. I had a lot of fun reading it! The action and drama was kept high throughout the course of the plot, and the twist at the end was marvelously well-done. I didn’t expect it at all– in fact, I thought I had worked out the solution about halfway through, but I was completely wrong. I love it when mystery books do that; it makes reading them into a fun game.

The characters were a bit harder to like, especially Tommy and Tuppence. They had a difficult time coming across as actual people, rather than pastiches of people. I don’t think I ever really broke through that thinking, but I did cheer them on to “win,” and I worried about Tommy when he was kidnapped, and I couldn’t stop smiling after T&T got engaged (that’s not a spoiler, is it? Surely everyone must know that they’re married, right?).

As I said before, I had a lot of fun reading this, and I’d easily recommend it to mystery fans, people who want to read something of Christie’s besides Poirot/Marple, and those who are fans of inter-war English detective fiction.