Read
Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh, one of the later installments in her Roderick Alleyn series (published 1972) and set against the backdrop of a country manor being restored by a wealthy eccentric, whose particular eccentricities include hiring a domestic staff consisting entirely of convicted murderers. I enjoyed this one a lot: Alleyn's wife, painter Agatha Troy, is the focal character until he shows up halfway through to figure out whodunnit, and I always love Marsh's Troy-centric novels; the wealthy eccentric was also a really great character. And it is, as the title suggests, seasonally relevant/a Christmas Episode!
Read
The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir (translated from Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal), a novella about a woman who is either having a mental health crisis or in the throes of something more supernatural when she finds herself waking up each morning to the increasingly violent aftermath of apparent sleepwalking episodes. Shades of Ottessa Moshfegh's
My Year of Rest & Relaxation, but darker/creepier/gorier. Do not read if you are particularly fond of cats. I picked this up after seeing a
review from
rachelmanija that both piqued my interest and tempered my expectations, and I'm glad I went in forewarned that the plot's ambiguity is never actually resolved and nothing is explained; I didn't mind the
Wouldn't that be messed up? Anyways I'm Rod Serling approach, but it would have been annoying to have expected answers that never came.
Have made some progress in the audiobook of Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein, and this is hardly a new/unique observation, but it really is wild to read the classics that have become so diffused into general pop culture, because you'll be like
yeah, yeah, we get it, it's a famous book and then you'll actually read it and it really is That Good???