My first re-read of the year

I’ve been intending to participate with Alex Black’s rereadathon for a few months now (it’s a year long thing) but being away at uni means I don’t have access to all my books so I don’t have anything to re-read! But this re-read ended up being a happy accident. A friend bought me The Thirteen Problems from a charity shop as she knows that I want to read all the Agatha Christie books and I didn’t realise that this was one of the books included in the Miss Marple Short Stories collection. There are other short stories within this collation of works, however, this book is the core part of it. But I did read it again and I really enjoyed it of course!

As I said above, this is a Miss Marple book. In contrast to Poirot, Marple is an old lady who has lived her whole life in a small British town and ergo, when she manages to solve mysteries everyone is shocked. It’s a really fun series and the short story format means that you fly through and get lots of information in one small package.

If you’ve never read Miss Marple before, this short story collection is a great place to start because they all link together into one larger book. They are told from the perspective of people at a “party” taking turns to tell the others about a mystery they’ve encountered and then getting the others to guess who did it. Meaning lots of individual mysteries whilst having them all connected.

I’m glad this was my first book of the re-readathon (I’m counting it and no-one can stop me! Okay maybe Alex can but I don’t think she will haha) and I look forward to reading more Marple in the future!

The Essential Spike Milligan, a review

This is the 3rd book I got around to in the 7in7readathon (which is still currently going and in which I am doing horrendously at!) and I really don’t think this was the best pick! Purely as this is a book I would’ve rather taken my time with, and not rushed through it in order to get onto the next book, as there’s a lot to think about. But, this was all my own fault so let’s get on with the review!

This is a collection of Spike Milligan’s work, before reading this I only knew of his children’s poetry and that’s why I picked this book up. However, unbeknownst to me he has written so much more in so many different areas and I am so glad to have been exposed to that. He wrote scripts for radio shows and television shows, adult poetry, memoirs from his time during WWII and more. It took me a while to get used to the scripts for the shows but eventually, I was ending up laughing out loud as I read them, like, literally!

His memoirs from the second world war were a surprise, as a lover of this time period, I didn’t even know he had served or that this book was going to contain anything from this era. Some of this was interesting, and some of it was purely heartbreaking to see the causes and effects of PTSD hit a man who shows so much humour and joviality to the outside world.

All these sections are broken up by some of his poetry for children, which I absolutely love! I love the tempo of them, the silliness which makes you smile and the way he makes the words rhyme in order to make you laugh. They are placed very well in order to provide relief from the more serious topics and I purely just find childlike joy from them!

If you want some quintessential, traditional British humour then definitely have a look into this book! I’m looking forward to being able to re-read this at a slower pace some time in the future!