Reading List

Reading List

I love to look at other people's book shelves, perusing them for titles I might like and for the books we have in common. It's a glimpse into someone else's brain. This list is a way for you to peek into my own shelves. It includes some of my favorite books in different genres, specifically classic thriller, modern young adult thriller, and non-fiction. 

Classic Thriller – And Then There Were None

(Book Cover from Amazon.com)

Agatha Christie is the greatest writer of detective fiction in English, and And Then There Were None is her best work. It doesn’t feature one of her famous detectives. No Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple appears to put together the clues and solve the mystery. In fact, no one solves it. No one stops the killer from carrying out his plan. If it weren’t for a confession thrown into the ocean in a bottle and found by a fisherman, no one would ever have learned what happened to the ten mis-matched guests who arrived on Soldier Island and, one by one, died there. (I apologize for the spoilers, but the book is eighty years old.)

Christie is praised for her inventive puzzles, but I don’t think she gets enough credit for the psychology that went into developing her characters. Each of the ten guests is painted in bold strokes, but they stand out clear and recognizable, each with a voice and personality that adds to the growing atmosphere that fills the isolated mansion. I can only dream of someday creating characters as memorable as Emily Brent, the righteous, judgmental spinster who feels no guilt for her part in the suicide of her housemaid; Vera Claythorne, the calm, competent games mistress who once let a child drown so her boyfriend could inherit a fortune; or Justice Wargrave, who sums up the evidence against each guest and silently condemns even though he’s been accused of sentencing an innocent man to death.

Young Adult Thriller – Little Monsters

(Book Cover from Amazon.com)

Authors like Kara Thomas are the modern heirs to Agatha Christie. They’re introducing a new generation of readers to unreliable narrators, hidden motives, and creeping dread.

Thomas’s 2017 novel features Kacey, a seventeen-year-old caught between competing loyalties and warring priorities. After being raised by an unstable single mother, she’s come to live with her father and his new family, including a stepbrother and a half-sister she now adores.

She’s also made friends. Jade and Bailey had been a sufficient-unto-themselves twosome for years, but when Kacey moved to town, they let her in, giving her acceptance and an intense kind of friendship. Kacey values their relationship enough to break family rules and join in their late-night adventures, so when Bailey disappears, Kacey can’t tell everything she knows. Most importantly, she can’t admit she snuck out of the house in the middle of the night and took her thirteen-year-old sister along.

Modern young adult thrillers lack the narrative distance that older detective stories offered the reader. The characters aren’t police officers or private detectives. They’re the friends of the victims or the killer’s next target. Their prime motivation is survival, not the intellectual satisfaction of solving a puzzle. That immediacy keeps me turning pages and staying up past my bedtime. Little Monsters is a brilliant example of that exhilarating experience.

Non-Fiction – Consider the Fork

(Book Cover from Amazon.com)

Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson is best described by its subtitle: A History of How We Cook and Eat. Wilson traces developments in the technology and tools of cooking and eating as a way to explore human history. She starts with one of the breakthroughs in primitive cooking—boiling. To boil food in a liquid requires a vessel of some kind. Throughout the book, the story advances in this way. The development of a new technique could not happen without the development of some necessary piece of kitchen equipment.

The author also shows how the tools used for cooking and eating changed with the surrounding culture. For example, in the middle ages in Europe, each person carried his own knife. It was used for personal protection but also to cut and eat food. But in the 1600s, fashion began to change. Using one’s own knife was considered uncivilized. Instead, knives were provided at the table, but they were blunt instead of sharp. As Wilson says, “It takes a civilization in an advanced state of politesse—or passive aggression—to devise on purpose a knife that does a worse job of cutting.”

This journey through culinary technology changed how I see the ordinary objects in my own kitchen. I rarely boil vegetables in my battered saucepan without remembering the amazing variety of cooking pans Wilson describes. I can’t help thinking in wonder of how far humans have come to put me in my own kitchen, cooking up a serving of carrots. But I also remember that cooking roots in boiling water is an experience I share with my most primitive ancestors.