This week's task for Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books
Books we loved when we were between 18-23, college age. What book did you read when you should have been reading THE ODYSSEY and THE HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION?
Well, you see that was when I became an Agatha Christie addict. Officially I was plodding my way through English classics: an English lecturer who believed that if he read Spenser's Faerie Queene to us in old English we would understand "enough" and appreciate the beauty of the language, another who decided to analyse James Joyce's ULYSSES at the rate of a chapter each week and miraculously stopped appearing at lectures after 4 or 5 weeks, solid reads like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Restoration comedy, Shakespeare etc etc.
My escape hatch was Agatha Christie, newly available here in Australia in Fontana paperbacks, those lovely little green Penguins of Maigret titles by George Simenon, and Josephine Tey's DAUGHTER OF TIME.
4 comments:
Kerrie - Oh, that's what I did, too! I read quite a lot of Christie when I was supposed to be reading "The Great Classics."
I married and had two of my children before I went to university so when I wasn´t cramming English literature, history etc, I would be reading Astrid Lindgren, nursery rhymes etc to my offspring.
And I think my first or second Christie was Roger Ackroyd. Didn't know she was breaking the rules.
Just think that nowadays, you can download Christie books and all kinds of lovely distractions to your cell phone. I'm not sure if I'd had that available as a college student, I would have passed my classes...
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