Tag: Standard

Agatha Christie – The Hollow | Review

August 13, 2020
Authors A-E (By Surname)Fiction

Title: The Hollow

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 224

Rating: 3.5/5

This is pretty much just your bog standard Agatha Christie book, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s also one of those books that, for me at least, is more about establishing a sense of place and time than it is about someone solving a murder mystery.

This is also a Hercule Poirot book, although the detective doesn’t necessarily get too much page time. For me, that’s no bad thing, as Poirot can be a little insufferable at times and so he’s generally best in moderation.

This was also a cracking little piece because of its dialogue, which made me chuckle quite a lot. It’s unusual for me to actually laugh out loud when reading a book, but it happened here and took me by surprise. Sure, the mystery itself isn’t one of Christie’s most gripping, but the dialogue and the setting more than make up for that.

Overall, I’d say that this is a decent enough Agatha Christie book, but it’s pretty mid-tier when you compare it to some of her big hitters. It’s worth a read and I would recommend it, but not for your first foray into her work. It’s more one for completionists or people who are reading the whole Poirot series.

Learn more about The Hollow.

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter – The Long Mars | Review

August 18, 2019
Authors A-E (By Surname)Authors P-T (By Surname)Fiction

Title: The Long Mars

Author: Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 448

Rating 3.5/5

 

 

By now, we’re up to book three of five in this series, and while I do think that the first book was incredible, it’s struggled to live up to the same high standard as the series has continued. We’re helped by the fact that the basic idea behind the story is pretty good and so it’s fun to watch the authors investigate.

In the first of these books, we follow what happens when stepping, a sort of new technology, is unleashed on the unsuspecting population of the world that we live in. With stepper boxes, people can hop from our world to a sort of adjacent parallel world, and that opens up whole new horizons when it comes to exploration.

The last two books have focused mainly on what’s been happening on our world, but in this one we see what happens when some explorers from a version of the earth near the Gap decide to head for Mars. Once there, they discover that you can hop between worlds on Mars too, and that opens up an entirely new type of exploration.

 

 

These books tend to take it pretty easy when it comes to the plot, and so sometimes it can feel as though the plot is dragging as you’re waiting for things to happen. In the first one, I quite liked that because I was having a lot of fun looking at all of the underlying science and the other ideas that it had in it. The problem is that the more time goes on, the more I kind of want the plot to accelerate.

Still, there’s plenty of good stuff here, and I’ll be continuing on with the last two books in the series and maybe even finishing the series by the end of the month. I just think that the series set itself up for a fall because the first book was so good, and the vibe that I’m getting so far is that pretty much everyone should give The Long Earth a go and then only the people who really enjoy that should keep going.

All in all then, I am of course glad that I read this, but at the same time I can appreciate that it’s not for everyone. Still, if you’ve read the first two books and you were thinking about continuing, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t. And it didn’t even end on a crazy cliffhanger like the first two did, so it has that going for it too. And that’s it.

 

 

Click here to buy The Long Mars.