When I was a kid 10000000 years ago, I loved the Hercule Poirot novels, but I never really read any of the other books by the same author, like the Miss Marple books, etc. It recently occurred to me that a fun project might be to read all of Agatha Christie's books in the order in which they were published, so on a recent trip to the library I grabbed this, the first book, first published back in 1920.
Cue the flashback to this book. SIGH.
Once again, I get it, the n-word was used a lot in those days, people (well, white people, of course) didn't think of it as particularly offensive, it's not used against someone but as a descriptor of a costume (which in some ways is way worse), but I just can't. I can't erase or change the past but it really sucks to be reading merrily along and get slapped in the face like this. I guess I might be able to overlook it if things today were very different but ..... I just can't.
Overall, this was a good mystery, although to be honest I had trouble keeping track of the characters. It was fun to meet M. Poirot for the first time and try to puzzle out the solution to the mystery, which is clever. But I think I will work on other books.
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