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I'm always a little surprised to discover there are Agatha Christie novels I either haven't read, or can't remember reading.
(For context: you could ask Veggie about the time we started playing a Miss Marple movie and I nope!-ed out after about five minutes when I realised which story it was. For the record, I hadn't reread the novel in question for a good seventeen years, in part because I disliked it. You'd still think a decade-plus would be enough of a reset button!)
Y'see, my family went on winter vacations. And I read faster as a child than I read now, so I always burned through the supply of books in my baggage about a week into the trip, so we'd go to the local library.
At the time, the local library's collection of fantasy and science fiction was . . . . sort of abysmal. But their mystery selection--assuming you found omnibuses as long as your forearm and considerably thicker than your tiny, squeaky wrists acceptable, which I did--wasn't too bad. Old, but not bad.
So I'd haul these giant black books along to the beach, and read English murders with sunscreen and salt sticky fingers while trying not to burn my tiny, squeaky shoulders to a rosy crisp.
As one does.
The trick, both in childhood and now, is that mysteries tend to be a read/see-once sort of affair, because once you know whodunnit the flailing around working out whodunnit is less interesting. (There are a multitude of exceptions, but all of them require and provide considerable plot and character development beyond the overarching structure of The Mystery. Even if only in implication.)
So if you've read a mystery before, it sort of lessens the experience the second time around. I couldn't tell you how many times I wound up returning partially-read books to that library, because I realised what I was reading a chapter or two in. The titles weren't generally a good way of remembering which story was which--which contributed to the problem, but seriously, this was popcorn reading and I wasn't knocking over a secondhand bookstore doing it*--and they're not the best way I can identify visual versions of the same stories. (Or theoretically the same. There's a recent Marple TV-movie series that takes massive amazing 'what the hell just happened here' liberties with their canon.)
*: don't ask about what my dad's and my science fiction/fantasy collections looked like when I was about twelve. *shifty eyes*
So it's always a bit of a surprise to encounter a derived-from-Christie story I honestly can't remember, because there are so many I do, with minimal prompting.
In other news, Miss Jane Marple would make small important gears in Monsieur Hercule Poirot's pointy little egg-shaped brain seize up, and it's a pity Dame Christie never felt the urge to show him up that badly. I would have cackled so hard, and bought the book it happened in, just to cackle again.
(For context: you could ask Veggie about the time we started playing a Miss Marple movie and I nope!-ed out after about five minutes when I realised which story it was. For the record, I hadn't reread the novel in question for a good seventeen years, in part because I disliked it. You'd still think a decade-plus would be enough of a reset button!)
Y'see, my family went on winter vacations. And I read faster as a child than I read now, so I always burned through the supply of books in my baggage about a week into the trip, so we'd go to the local library.
At the time, the local library's collection of fantasy and science fiction was . . . . sort of abysmal. But their mystery selection--assuming you found omnibuses as long as your forearm and considerably thicker than your tiny, squeaky wrists acceptable, which I did--wasn't too bad. Old, but not bad.
So I'd haul these giant black books along to the beach, and read English murders with sunscreen and salt sticky fingers while trying not to burn my tiny, squeaky shoulders to a rosy crisp.
As one does.
The trick, both in childhood and now, is that mysteries tend to be a read/see-once sort of affair, because once you know whodunnit the flailing around working out whodunnit is less interesting. (There are a multitude of exceptions, but all of them require and provide considerable plot and character development beyond the overarching structure of The Mystery. Even if only in implication.)
So if you've read a mystery before, it sort of lessens the experience the second time around. I couldn't tell you how many times I wound up returning partially-read books to that library, because I realised what I was reading a chapter or two in. The titles weren't generally a good way of remembering which story was which--which contributed to the problem, but seriously, this was popcorn reading and I wasn't knocking over a secondhand bookstore doing it*--and they're not the best way I can identify visual versions of the same stories. (Or theoretically the same. There's a recent Marple TV-movie series that takes massive amazing 'what the hell just happened here' liberties with their canon.)
*: don't ask about what my dad's and my science fiction/fantasy collections looked like when I was about twelve. *shifty eyes*
So it's always a bit of a surprise to encounter a derived-from-Christie story I honestly can't remember, because there are so many I do, with minimal prompting.
In other news, Miss Jane Marple would make small important gears in Monsieur Hercule Poirot's pointy little egg-shaped brain seize up, and it's a pity Dame Christie never felt the urge to show him up that badly. I would have cackled so hard, and bought the book it happened in, just to cackle again.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 09:44 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 05:46 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 03:38 pm (UTC)From:The only exceptions to which are the more procedural ones, where it doesn't really matter so much WHO did it as HOW you find out, how you prove it, which requires a lot more 'remembering of the plot' before it's boring. And the character arcs, where again it's not so much 'who did it' as 'how the process of finding out who did it changes the narrator'.
I like the City Watch Discworld books :) And I enjoy rewatching episodes of Castle, or CSI, but I've found I can't rewatch Criminal Minds much unless it's marathoning seasons, because the character arcs are the only thing left to be interesting and CM character arcs are slooooow.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 05:54 pm (UTC)From:I could see Castle being really fun for rewatching. Sort of like Lie to Me (though that one requires a bit of cherrypicking for maximum primary character Interesting and minimal 'oh god, the plot's doing That Thing') in a sense.
I personally struggle with the various flavours of CSI because the murders tend to be really grisly (or really Rube Goldberg) and the investigators don't attract much intensity of attention? And I kind of flail my way through Elementary episodes because good god the plots are ridiculous but the dynamic of the primary characters is delightful.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 07:21 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 07:26 pm (UTC)From:Obvs, mmv. But the only reason I rewatch is because of that: for a very long time the writers were really good at packing each scene full of illumination in regards to their cast, and there are a bunch where later reveals cast light on previous action.