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what i'm reading wednesday 19/3/2025
What I finished:
+ Towards Zero by Agatha Christie. I picked this one up because I wanted to read it before watching the miniseries...only reading it made me not want to watch the miniseries! Not because the book wasn't good--it's a very solid Christie--but because it was clear from watching about 20 minutes of the show that they'd made a ton of unnecessary changes, so I quit watching in a huff.
My main takeaway was exactly what it always is with a well-done Christie: a need to immediately go back and reread and see how she did that. I don't particularly read Christie for the plot and not for the characters. I read her because it's such a joy to watch someone do something so well; in this case: crafting a whodunit. Competence porn!
I liked this one's focus (a divorced man, his ex-wife, his current wife, and various family members) and liked how, per the title, there was a lot of lead-up to the actual murder. If you like Christie and haven't read her, you should read this one!
I'm very miffed about the miniseries, though. When a story is this meticulously crafted, you can't change things without ruining the story, so why change things???? I really can't understand why they thought the changes were necessary. Why are these adaptations so hit and miss? For every Why Didn't They Ask Evans? we get a Towards Zero. Boo!
+ Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning by Petr Beihart. This book was not what I thought it would be, which is partly my own fault for not looking into it more before I started it but also the fault of whoever chose the title. I had hoped it would be a real moral reckoning with what Judaism is going to look like now that Israel is committing genocide. I think this is desperately needed and we need to apply our moral imaginations as individuals and a community to figuring out how to create a post-Zionist Judaism. (Or, at least those of us who aren't doubling down on Zionism need to. My hope is that once we can clearly articulate one, we might be able to coax along those who are still clinging to Zionism to join us. This is probably a naive hope.)
That's...not really what the book is about. Instead, it's a very short but readable and well-done argument against Zionism. I feel like it's really a book for Jews who want to question Zionism but haven't felt like they could. I can definitely see the arguments in it tipping someone over the fence. So if you're looking for something very readable for someone who needs a little push, this is a very good resource for that.
Oh, and I super enjoyed the perspective of a South African Jew. Not one I encounter a lot, and his insights re: apartheid were great.
+ Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time by James Gurney. I hadn't reread this one since I was a kid, but someone on my flist recently read it for the first time, and I was like, "I should reread that!" So I did!
The story itself is relatively flimsy, but it doesn't matter because the art and worldbuilding are so wonderful. (Thank you, Mr. Gurney, for addressing waste disposal!) It's just such a labor of love, and it's always a joy to encounter art where the artist's love for their own creation just leaps off the page. This edition had an afterword about the writing--all about how Gurney spent years and years working on it, got people to dress up and pose for him, studied dinosaurs, etc. Which was great fun! It's so wonderful that all his hard work was rewarded with universal acclaim (and money).
A joyful book! Has anyone read the sequels? I never did, but maybe I will now.
+ The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar. I didn't love this novella, but I appreciated it a lot and think it's very good. The idea of drawing parallels between slave ships in the 18th-19th centuries and generation ships was really brilliant. I'm always up for a generation ship story, and this one was an interesting blend of parable and a more novelistic approach. There were many times when it felt like the kind of parable that could be told around a campfire, and other times when the little details (Majorie, the cocktails, etc.) were perfectly novelistic.
I liked that the story's view of oppression, resistance, and recovery were not simplistic--it's nice to encounter ideas like,
Anyway, this one is recommended too!
What I'm currently reading:
+ Got my copy of Everything Is Tuberculosis! Very excited! It's shorter than I anticipated though. :(((
+ The Jesus Machine by Dan Gilgoff because Focus on the Family/James Dobson is one of my hobby horses. This is only available on Hoopla, and I haven't figured out how to get that on my very old Kindle, so I have to read it on my phone, and I hate reading on my phone, so it's going slowly.
+ Also still dabbling in The Historian now and then.
+ Towards Zero by Agatha Christie. I picked this one up because I wanted to read it before watching the miniseries...only reading it made me not want to watch the miniseries! Not because the book wasn't good--it's a very solid Christie--but because it was clear from watching about 20 minutes of the show that they'd made a ton of unnecessary changes, so I quit watching in a huff.
My main takeaway was exactly what it always is with a well-done Christie: a need to immediately go back and reread and see how she did that. I don't particularly read Christie for the plot and not for the characters. I read her because it's such a joy to watch someone do something so well; in this case: crafting a whodunit. Competence porn!
I liked this one's focus (a divorced man, his ex-wife, his current wife, and various family members) and liked how, per the title, there was a lot of lead-up to the actual murder. If you like Christie and haven't read her, you should read this one!
I'm very miffed about the miniseries, though. When a story is this meticulously crafted, you can't change things without ruining the story, so why change things???? I really can't understand why they thought the changes were necessary. Why are these adaptations so hit and miss? For every Why Didn't They Ask Evans? we get a Towards Zero. Boo!
+ Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning by Petr Beihart. This book was not what I thought it would be, which is partly my own fault for not looking into it more before I started it but also the fault of whoever chose the title. I had hoped it would be a real moral reckoning with what Judaism is going to look like now that Israel is committing genocide. I think this is desperately needed and we need to apply our moral imaginations as individuals and a community to figuring out how to create a post-Zionist Judaism. (Or, at least those of us who aren't doubling down on Zionism need to. My hope is that once we can clearly articulate one, we might be able to coax along those who are still clinging to Zionism to join us. This is probably a naive hope.)
That's...not really what the book is about. Instead, it's a very short but readable and well-done argument against Zionism. I feel like it's really a book for Jews who want to question Zionism but haven't felt like they could. I can definitely see the arguments in it tipping someone over the fence. So if you're looking for something very readable for someone who needs a little push, this is a very good resource for that.
Oh, and I super enjoyed the perspective of a South African Jew. Not one I encounter a lot, and his insights re: apartheid were great.
+ Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time by James Gurney. I hadn't reread this one since I was a kid, but someone on my flist recently read it for the first time, and I was like, "I should reread that!" So I did!
The story itself is relatively flimsy, but it doesn't matter because the art and worldbuilding are so wonderful. (Thank you, Mr. Gurney, for addressing waste disposal!) It's just such a labor of love, and it's always a joy to encounter art where the artist's love for their own creation just leaps off the page. This edition had an afterword about the writing--all about how Gurney spent years and years working on it, got people to dress up and pose for him, studied dinosaurs, etc. Which was great fun! It's so wonderful that all his hard work was rewarded with universal acclaim (and money).
A joyful book! Has anyone read the sequels? I never did, but maybe I will now.
+ The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar. I didn't love this novella, but I appreciated it a lot and think it's very good. The idea of drawing parallels between slave ships in the 18th-19th centuries and generation ships was really brilliant. I'm always up for a generation ship story, and this one was an interesting blend of parable and a more novelistic approach. There were many times when it felt like the kind of parable that could be told around a campfire, and other times when the little details (Majorie, the cocktails, etc.) were perfectly novelistic.
I liked that the story's view of oppression, resistance, and recovery were not simplistic--it's nice to encounter ideas like,
"Find your allies wherever you can, even if you don't like them and they're in it for the wrong reasons," "You might not be able to give up the trappings of oppression right away, and that's fine if you need them as a crutch while you work new muscles," and "People from the privileged class who you might think were on your side might actually hate and resent you if you start to try to dismantle oppression instead of trying to become One of the Good Ones." Also really nice is: the community that you were forced to create because of oppression can be the very thing that empowers you to resist oppression!
Anyway, this one is recommended too!
What I'm currently reading:
+ Got my copy of Everything Is Tuberculosis! Very excited! It's shorter than I anticipated though. :(((
+ The Jesus Machine by Dan Gilgoff because Focus on the Family/James Dobson is one of my hobby horses. This is only available on Hoopla, and I haven't figured out how to get that on my very old Kindle, so I have to read it on my phone, and I hate reading on my phone, so it's going slowly.
+ Also still dabbling in The Historian now and then.
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Argh, I heard this from another flister who watched it, but I was still hoping it might not be the case somehow. I can't even remember for sure if I've read this one, but there are things you can do with Christie and things that just screw everything up because of how tightly she plots. (Like, most of the ITV Marples were daft, but they were generally pretty good fun, even the ones where they inadvisably inserted Miss Marple into places she should not be, and when they weren't, we always had the older BBC ones with Joan Hickson.)
I think part of the difference with Why Didn't They Ask Evans? seems to have been that it wasn't one of these big darker much more changed BBC versions they keep making, but a separate ITV adapation done by Hugh Laurie, if I'm not imagining that bit.
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Definitely. And in this case, there was no reason to change those things. The story holds up perfectly well today!
I enjoyed And then There Were None a few years ago and also Ordeal by Innocence, even though the latter changed things they (again) didn't need to change. It wasn't a very good adaptation, but it worked for me as a show.
But I definitely think that Hugh Laurie needs to make many more adaptations stat!
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True!
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I haven't reread any Christie in years, I think I shall!
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