Updates | Bookstagram | FYI

Hey guys! I pause in my NaNoWriMo writing in order to come and tell you of a few updates in my life.

I get that I've been rather quiet on here. There haven't been any new book reviews, but there's been a THM recipe (which is totally easy to make and anyone can enjoy it)! I've been a bit busy with writing, and I've been in a bit of reading slump (Not by Sight drove me insane, I find the main woman character rather unlikable), but my latest book haul has come in.

I had to race a severe thunderstorm in order to get them from the mail box!

(haha... eh -_-)

I learned something today: you can ask Indigo - Canada's biggest bookstore - to swap a book you've just got in the mail for another if you were sent a damaged copy. Out of the books I got, The Tropic of Serpents: a Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan (the sequel to A Natural History of Dragons) was damaged with the cover being scratched up by extensive handling, and the cover was bent in a place. So, with my mom's advice, I called up customer service, and the nice lady on the other side of the line helped me swap it for a pristine copy of the book, and emailed me a tag for the parcel I'm going to send the copy I have now back.

So - when you run into the problem of your book arriving damaged, call, ask for a pristine replacement, ask for a return label, and say that you will return it. I don't know if it works with other book-store chains, but it should. It would be horrible if it didn't.

My book haul consists of five books - which I bought in order to take advantage of Chapters/Indigo's unplug for the summer promotion, which would net me 4,500 points ($10 worth) on top of however many I got for the books through the normal channel (which is awesome since I'm going back to college this fall). I've provided the covers, because they're all beautiful.

I didn't include The Tropic of Serpents since the copy I have is not the copy I'm keeping.

It's kind of funny that three of the books I ordered were blue, and two had green (because the dragon on the cover of Tropic of Serpents is green. I honestly can't wait to crack into these books. I think I'm going to start with True to You, since I had begun reading it when Bethany House Publishers wanted me to review it - but I ran out of time. I think I'm going to review it anyway, because I was so into it.

Another piece of news: I've finally got a Bookstagram (an Instagram focused on reading and books) up and running! My username is 'space.locomotive' - couldn't think of an interesting or witty book-themed one, so I went with the layman's term of a vehicle in my current writing project. 'Space locomotive' is another name for 'star train'.

I'm so looking forward to posting pictures of books! I've only posted one picture so far - of my TBR pile. But I hope to get a picture of my bookshelf and my newest book haul in the coming week - or maybe in the next couple of days.

Of course, my bookstagram won't only be for the books I review or take pictures of (I'll likely post a picture of the book I've just read and provide a link in the post to the review here), it'll also host pictures and updates of the stories I hope will one day publish. They'll be simpler echoes of what I post here n_n

Today was a good day, and it wasn't dampened by the thunderstorm we had this afternoon!

Though having to lower my wordcount goal for Camp NaNoWriMo another 10k was a bit of a bummer. I was hoping to have Murder of Whimsey relatively finished by the end of this month.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Agatha Christie. 1920. William Morrow Paperbacks. Pages: 230 (plus an extra scene). [Source: Bought]

Who poisoned wealthy Emily Inglethorp and how did the murderer penetrate and escape from her locked bedroom? Suspects abound in the quaint village of Styles St. Mary - from the heiress's fawning new husband to her two stepsons, her volatile housekeeper, and a pretty nurse who works in a hospital dispensary. Making his unforgettable debut, the brilliant Belgian detective is on the case.

~~~

Rating: ★★★✩✩

Although I finished this novel on New Years Eve, this review comes a couple days too late and doesn't count towards the Back to the Classics challenge I participated in last year. Unfortunately, I went to college, and the course load didn't let me pick it up other than to move it around my dorm room.

I have mixed feelings about this mystery, I guess I'm still getting used to Agatha Christie's style, but I found this mystery to be rather long-winded. I get that this was the first book of her Hercule Poirot series and that she was basically introducing her character in this book, but there were some things that irked me.

Silly me, I found myself introducing myself to Agatha Christie through the tenth book in her Hercule Poirot series, Murder On the Orient Express. So it came as quite a shock when I began to read The Mysterious Affair at Styles and I found the story had been written in first-person - since the other had been written in third. I guess this is what I disliked the most about this book, because I came in expecting to follow Poirot around and instead found myself following this guy around whose last name was not 'Poirot'.

All in all, I did enjoy this novel, even though the time it took for me to finish reading this (which was 4 months) made it feel like the mystery had stretched on forever. I enjoyed the mystery because you couldn't tell who was the murderer until the very end. And the true murderer of Emily Inglethorp came as quite the shock to me. I never saw it coming!