What to Read During Virgo Season
Virgos, my second favorite Earth sign, get their due today.
Welcome to another edition of Amateur Bibliotherapy, my newsletter about book-y things. Use this Google Form at any time to tell me about what you’re reading—you might be featured here or on my Bookstagram! I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that I may make a small commission if you make a purchase through my affiliate links. That commission will be donated to Welcome To Chinatown before the year’s end.
Welcome to a rare Monday dispatch! Sunday slipped away from me before I had the chance to hit send.
Though the last two weeks have been full of pretty biblical BS, I tried to cozy up and nest among the wreckage of the world. I got my very own Brooklyn Public Library card, which is decorated with characters from Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are; saw Hadestown on Broadway after its 18-month pandemic-induced hiatus; went to Citi Field for a Subway series game where the Mets actually won; rescued yet another piece of furniture off the streets of Cobble Hill; and played a time-loop game called The Forgotten City that will inevitably influence my upcoming reading. What a time to be alive.
Virgo Season
August, the sweaty armpit of the year, is finally over. Long live September, the month when the action starts back up after those languid summer days. In the world of books, Virgo season is strong.
Happy birthday (9/12) to my literary king Kim Namjoon, leader of BTS and light of my silly little life. He recommends good books, in addition to being smart and talented and all things wonderful.
Also this week (9/15) is the birthday of Dame Agatha Christie, the queen of cozy crime who has helped a lot of people get through a pandemic from beyond the grave. Though her legacy obviously extends across generations (I love to get Old People talking about Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot) and the globe (her novels have been translated into 100+ languages), my favorite element of her reach is the poisonous plant garden established in her honor. The Potent Plants Garden at Torre Abbey in Devon boasts of maintaining the plant species that contain many of the poisons Christie wrote about in her books. Let’s all plan a trip to the International Agatha Christie Festival next year and learn about ricin together.
I kicked off September with The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji, which is “less a novel than an ingenious card trick transformed into the shape of bound pages printed with text.” Its structure references Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, a formative novel in my life in which a mission-oriented murderer serially kills a group of isolated inhabitants. In Decagon, the site of several gruesome murders becomes the fixation of a local university’s Mystery Club and they decide to visit the scene of the crime. But the members quickly learn that history can repeat itself when one of their own ends up dead.
As a quintessential example of honkaku—a Japanese genre of mysteries that “attempt to replicate the aesthetic of the golden age of Western detective fiction” with more focus on deduction and logic—Decagon simultaneously felt like a love letter to whodunnits by the likes of Christie and an entirely unique puzzle with unpredictable but orderly conclusions. Part of that experience hinges on Ayatsuji’s clever ways of reminding the reader “to approach the book as a mystery to be solved and not merely a story to be read.” My amateur sleuthing was not up to snuff; I was shocked by the mechanics of the ending.
Shortly after Decagon, I decided to read one of the few Agatha Christie books I hadn’t inadvertently spoiled for myself in all these years: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a book that simply should not be adapted into a TV show or movie. (Even David Suchet couldn’t make it work.) Even though I figured out the twist ending, there were enough other surprises that I still had a delightful time. I will never not laugh at vegetable marrows because of this book.
In addition to the various genre-related intimacies between these two books, they had one other thing in common: both include murders that take place in mid-September. (This coming week, to be exact.)
I also read The Betrayals by Bridget Collins, a beautifully-written low fantasy slow burn, and The Sweetest Oblivion by Danielle Lori, a MAFIA ROMANCE!!! I will not be taking further questions about the latter at this time.
I have to get back to screaming about the title changes between the US and UK versions of this book that I plan to finally read. Bye!