One of the vital pleasant choices I made this 12 months was to declare a “summer season of snob.” For just a few gloriously scorching and sunny months, my fiction (and typically nonfiction) studying was loosely organized across the theme of snobbery. Crazy heiresses, high-society murders and sophistication nervousness galore populated my studying record, giving simply sufficient of a thematic by line to offer attention-grabbing comparisons with out turning into repetitive or boring.
So I’m going to do one thing comparable this winter, and choose up a murder-mystery theme for the subsequent month or two. It’s a style that I discover psychologically comforting, as a result of homicide mysteries exist in ordered, if violent universes: Unhealthy folks do dangerous issues in them, however they don’t get away with it. That makes for a nice departure from our far-less-tidy actuality.
I suppose I actually embarked upon this theme just a few weeks in the past. I’ve been watching “A Homicide On the Finish of the World,” a miniseries from Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij that looks like what you’d get for those who cross-pollinated “Glass Onion” with “The Woman With the Dragon Tattoo.” It’s basically a country-house homicide thriller up to date for the A.I. period, however thus far it’s not fairly cozy sufficient for me. (Too many shiny billionaires, too few goofy eccentrics.) Nonetheless, I’ll watch the ultimate two installments to see the place it’s all going — the foreshadowing that All Is Not As It Appears has been so heavy that I shall be amused if the large twist seems to be that it was petty, low-tech human jealousy all alongside.
Alternatively, “The Enchantment,” by Janice Hallett, which is about in an English village’s novice theater troupe, is as cozy as they arrive. And its Christmas-themed sequel, described as a “festive homicide thriller,” sounds prefer it dials the comfy issue as much as 11. It’s on my record.
In fact, it’s doable to take coziness — thriller or in any other case — a bit too far. Dorothy Parker, famously, objected to A.A. Milne’s saccharine prose in “The Home At Pooh Nook,” writing in her evaluate that “Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.” However “The Purple Home Thriller,” Milne’s tackle the country-estate homicide style, is far lighter on the bumbling anthropomorphized bears, and likewise numerous enjoyable. It ought to let you know one thing that Raymond Chandler, who presumably abjured cuddliness in all its varieties, was a fan of the guide.
Reader responses: Books that you simply advocate
George Fleming, a reader in Mount Vernon, Ohio, recommends “The Earl of Louisiana” by A.J. Liebling:
A tremendously entertaining guide and an entire clarification of human nature. One for the ages.
Jill Berke, a reader in Miami Seashore, Fla., recommends “Do No Hurt” by Henry Marsh:
The writer, a British neurosurgeon, takes us inside his thoughts and arms as chapter by chapter he explains particular circumstances affecting the mind. How he decides to function and what happens every time he components a cranium to see the mind is a compassionate, trustworthy lesson find the stability between actuality and hope for his sufferers. It’s a spot all of us inhabit after we are medically chargeable for a beloved one or put together for our personal dying. Studying this superbly written guide made me much less fearful to discover that stability and extra aware of the lure of denial.
What are you studying?
Thanks to everybody who wrote in to inform me about what you’re studying. Please maintain the submissions coming!
I wish to hear about issues you may have learn (or watched or listened to) that you simply advocate to Interpreter readers. That could possibly be a selected favourite from this 12 months, a guide that modified your thoughts about one thing, or a favourite thriller that you simply assume ought to be on my record.
