Sunday 24 June 2012

Agatha Christie

My advanced student (12 years old) and I started reading "And Then There Were None", a mystery novel by Agatha Christie.  Compared to the last two books that we read--"Holes" and "When You Reach Me" (young adult novels, both of which are great and I would recommend to anyone), this one has much more challenging vocabulary, given partly that it was published in 1939 and thus includes some older English, and partly that it is quite descriptive about characters' personalities (so, more adjectives as opposed to nouns, "conscientiously determined" vs. "cot").

The Wiki article about "And Then There Were None" says that it has sold 100,000,000 copies, and the book bio states that Christie's many novels have sold 2 billion copies around the world.  She is the world's leading bookseller after the Bible.  Pretty amazing!