April 23: Polly’s First Year at Boarding School by Dorothy Whitehill. It took me a while to realise that this is a boarding-school book set in the United States. The usual boarding-school things happen but there doesn’t seem to be a plot, everybody likes the protagonist, and the only antagonist until now is the Latin teacher. A nice comfy read. I have another of these, if it stays this unproblematic I might try to find the rest: there are 13! (One little strangeness: it breaches the fourth wall at the beginning of Chapter 3 with “… during the month which elapsed between then and the opening of this chapter”. And a similar thing once more.)
April 22: The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie. I found A Pocket Full of Rye next in the unread list on the ereader and didn’t feel like that so I sought out a Miss Marple that I know I like. It’s slow-paced, but all resolves perfectly, almost like a Freeman Wills Crofts book.
April 20: Inspector French and the Sea Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts. As good as the other one. I liked the “show your work” aspects of the investigation, though that made it very complicated especially near the end. Nice resolution!
Kennut zijn dat ik u kan? en Taaltje wel, taaltje niet by Bert Japin (no links, because searching only gets me second-hand book sites). Collected essays/columns from the 1960s about various language idiosyncrasies, anecdotes, hilarious mistakes. Some rather dated but most still entertaining. It turns out to be from Taaltje wel, taaltje niet that I know that “Leyden” means “On the Two Streams”!
Leave a Reply