MarysLibrary

Almost Done

For some time now I've been reading the oeuvre of Agatha Christie. Inspired by the Random Jottings blog, where Elaine has read through the books and also reviewed a biography of Christie, I have read the two series, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. There are many more non-series books which I will be approaching soon. Meanwhile, with Elephants Can Remember I have reached the next to the last book in the Poirot series and I'm stopping for a few days to savor the thirty-some mysteries I've read before I go on to the last of the books, one that was written some years before the author's death and held until the end of her life. 

We have acquired over the years DVDs of the TV adaptations of the novels with the incomparable David Suchet as the mustachioed Belgian detective. I read the mysteries, watched the TV productions,and then re-read the books. A rewarding way to approach these books, which are often dismissed as "genre" fiction whereas they are fine novels with the added pleasure of recurring characters. And a second reading allows the reader to spot the clues (and red herrings) that are larded throughout.

I've also read and re-read the Miss Marple books, watching the TV productions in between. And I now find I'm reading them for the third time in a year or so, this time with my friend Elaine (12) with whom I read every week. She likes picking up new words. I was surprised to find an extensive vocabulary used in these books. (The Nancy Drew novels are also better written and using a more complex vocabulary than they are given credit for. But only the original ones. The re-writes are dumbed down and made to offer current political fads.)

So I'm feeling the let down after finishing so many novels and parting with the people in them. 

However. There are those non-series books to be tackled and I'm hoping to do that as soon as I finish my current project, which is a Great Courses series of lectures on Medieval England and the reading of the booklet that goes along with the DVDs as well as a couple of histories of England. Stay tuned. 

Contagion

A few weeks ago the Economist listed a few books that their staff recommended if one wanted to read about the building crisis due to the Wuhan virus. One of them was Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. That year was 1665 and so it's surprising how relevant it is to our day. People acted the same then as now, ignoring advice and disobeying rules in order to do what they wanted. Even though it often led to the death of their whole family.

That plague of course was the Black Death and deadly it was. We are dealing with a virus that is deadly only to certain segments of the population. But whether spreading like wildfire or creeping around to strike nursing homes and meat processing plants, both have patterns of contagion.

The author of The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread -- and Why They Stop, Adam Kucharski, is a statistician who works at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has studied Ebola in Africa and various tropical diseases. But he is also interested in other things that are contagious like gun violence. Increase in violence in Rwanda, resembles disease spread in Somalia, for example.

A fascinating book, filled with new ideas (new to me) and potential solutions to problems involving the spreading of everything from financial bubbles to fake news.