[sun surfer]

Coming up towards the end of March and a quarter through the year, I'm still on track at one book ahead of schedule. I did finish my winter goal of reading Dune, and my spring goal will begin with April. I chose one longer book for winter but will go with two shorter/medium books for spring:

-The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
-The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang

Both from the earlier 20th century but very different reads. One fiction, one non-fiction.

With the Christie, I read a lot of Christie growing up. My mother had many shelves of books, and she especially liked mystery and especially had many, many Christie's. I often had nothing to read but what was on her shelves and so as a wee lad was reading about murder from six or seven on up. I've probably read, at least partially, upwards of 50 by Christie. But, I don't remember many of them - almost any, really, except for vague scenes that I have no idea from which books they come - and being young and carefree with my reading would often just start and skip around and abandon at whim, so even if I could remember them all, the amount that I actually read through start to finish would be much, much lower. Still, even though I would bore of them and not understand a lot, I enjoyed them.

I don't think I've read any Christie in a decade or two. I think the last was my full read-through of And Then There Were None (I had, of course, read pieces of it when even younger) in my late teens/early 20s. I enjoyed it immensely but then, as now, I had this feeling of wanting to read so many different books and authors that somehow I never got back to Christie, until now. And what better way to start than with her first?

As for the Lin Yutang, it's a Chinese philosophy book on the art of enjoying life, and I think there's an emphasis on not becoming too busy to enjoy life properly, which could be good for me at the moment.