Thanks for the suggestion, -t. I found I could listen to the book at 1.3 speed without it sounding like the Chipmunks were reading it. It’s still not a good book but I’ll get to the end faster this way.

Sweet.

One of the doohickeys that let's me know there are even more books out there I might want to read advised me that I might like something called The Belt. Sounded like some kind of exciting accessory-themed something or other, so I checked it out, but it's just set in an asteroid belt, which might also be good but wasn't what I was hoping for by then...

So, a while back I just gave up on The Mystery of Edwin Drood (trying to figure out which edition or version or whatever to read was Too Hard I will try again when I have more brain capacity for that kind of thing), read enough of The Circular Staircase to decide that while I think I will enjoy it, it is not really a detective story as such and therefore I could skip ahead to Agatha Christie.

There is way too much Agatha Christie.

I have now read all of Miss Marple in order, because that was manageable, and enjoyable! I'm even watching what adaptations I can easily find because I have become interested in adaptations in an abstract way - like, why do they make these choice to change things? Some of them have been very faithful to the original, some have made changes I approve of, and some seem to just make random changes for no apparent reason and some of those make me sad.

Anyway, what I was coming here to say was that because I cannot possibly read all the rest of Agatha Christie without breaks, I have sidetracked into the Detection Club collaborative books. I read a sample of The Floating Admiral a while back and decided not to go any further with it, but I gave it another shot and while the Prologue remains terrible (wtf, Chesterton, why so racist?) and I cannot really say I enjoyed it as a mystery novel as such, as a dialog between writers it's really interesting. So I added some authors to my spreadsheet to look into. And I've started Ask a Policeman, where I guess authors have traded detectives? Three people I've never heard of and Dorothy Sayers (plus some foreword and the like). So the first detective is Mrs Bradley, who I have never heard of, and while this version was written by not-the-author I was intrigued enough to see what books were available. There are 65 in Kindle Unlimited! Sixty-five! I don't know how far into them I am really going to get but that is a pretty good pile.

Happy to recommend specific Poirot books, if you like. There are...a lot.

I would like that, Dana. So many! And I vaguely remember a lot of them but not clearly enough to decide whether I want to read them again or not. I have actually read all the early ones through [checks spreadsheet] Lord Edgeware Dies because quite a few of those I don't think I read before, somehow, and the ones I did remember I wanted to read again. And I'm going to read Murder on the Orient Express because while I know I've read it when I watched the Branagh movie I couldn't remember a lot of the details. But after that, it's kind of overwhelming.

After a quick look at Wikipedia, I like:

• The ABC Murders
• Cards on the Table
• Dumb Witness
• Death on the Nile
• Hercule Poirot's Christmas
• Sad Cypress
• Evil Under the Sun
• The Hollow
• After the Funeral
• The Clocks
• The Third Girl
• Halloween Party
• Curtain

And the short stories are generally fun.

I have actually read all the early ones through [checks spreadsheet] Lord Edgeware Dies because quite a few of those I don't think I read before, somehow, and the ones I did remember I wanted to read again. And I'm going to read Murder on the Orient Express because while I know I've read it when I watched the Branagh movie I couldn't remember a lot of the details. But after that, it's kind of overwhelming.

-t, I'm in the middle of a long-term project to reread Christie (I have the entire Bantam set), but I've only gotten through the 1930s so far. Of those past Edgeware (a dozen or so), my favorite Poirots are Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and Hercule Poirot's Christmas. The latter being essentially the basic plot of Knives Out. I'd rank Cards on the Table and Death in the Clouds just below those. I also really liked Why Didn't They Ask Evans? but that is a stand-alone, not Poirot. Sadly, I didn't like The ABC Murders as much as I remembered liking it as a teen.

Thanks to you both! I will highlight those to not be skipped. I actually read Death on the Nile out of order recently because of the movie coming out (and also probably it was on sale, that's usually why I get books earlier than planned) and Hercule Poirot's Christmas because I was in a Holiday Murder Mystery zone there for a while. That's kind of a weird subgenre if I stop to think about it, but I like it.

I'm definitely planning on reading Why Didn't They Ask Evans because I remember one key thing from it and nothing else except that I liked it when I read it the first time. The Marple adaptation of that, btw, did not please me, even remembering so little about it.

I read a lot of Christie back in my teens ... enough that I found I was picking the villain in the first chapter. That probably indicates I read too much, but I enjoyed it at the time. I like the PBS versions with David Suchet as Poirot (haven't seen the Kenneth Branagh versions). I find I can remember a number of plots. And PBS did some Christie versions with episodes from her own life - in one of them she goes to Egypt and meets her second husband, the archaeologist. (She once commented that the great thing about marrying an archaeologist was that the older she got the more interesting he found her.)

I've watched some of Poirot with Suchet. There's an awful lot of that, too! 13 seasons or something?Putting off deciding if and how I want to approach all that.