#Laura Thompson

[nanowrimo]

30 Covers, 30 Days 2022: Day 25

Want some body swap shenanigans? Well, day twenty five has you covered! Today, we have Fantasy novel The Quantum Ring by Laura Thompson. This cover was designed by returning designer, Roshanak Keyghobadi.

The Quantum Ring

A modern day woman gets a ring stuck on her finger at an antique store. The next day she wakes up in the body of an elven adventurer, a member of a missionary group in a world filled with magic and dragons. The elf is wearing the same ring and every night they switch bodies, searching for answers and a way to take the ring off in both realms.

About the Author

Laura Thompson works from home cabin in the woods with her husband and lots of house plants. She loves fantasy, sci-fi and horror in all mediums and her stories tend to fall into those categories. She has never let anyone read her NaNoWriMo novels

About the Designer

Roshanak Keyghobadi is an artist / educator / writer. This is her 8th year participating in NaNoWriMo! She teaches at Farmingdale State College (SUNY) and also holds private art classes at her Art Circle Studio. Roshanak loves creating collages and photomontages that are complex and fun therefore her favorite tools are a pair of scissors and a glue stick. Her works has been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums and reviewed in New York Times. You can read her essays on contemporary design in Design Observer and NESHAN and see more of her artworks on Instagram

[nevinslibrary]

Totally Random Non-Fiction Tuesday

I’ve read Agatha Christie’s novels of course, and they've always impressed me by how tight and well plotted and just… in a lot of ways they are like no other books I’ve read. So, I was interested to read more about Agatha Christie herself to see how that fit into the books that she wrote.

I mean, wow. Thompson goes into everything. And, even had interviews with Christie’s daughter and grandson too. There was the archeological digs, all about her various relationships, and, of course, her 11 day disappearance as well.

Honestly, the book was just as much fun as the Christie mysteries, and reading about her makes me want to go back and read more of the books the she wrote that I haven’t haven’t yet read too.

You may like this book If you Liked: The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict, The Grand Tour by Agatha Christie, or The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards

Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life by Laura Thompson

[living400lbs]

Agatha Christie earned £25 for The Mysterious Affair At Styles, published in 1920.

"In 1924 Agatha was offered five hundred pounds by the Evening News for serialisation of The Man in the Brown Suit, a sum that greatly astounded her husband and sister although not, of course, her mother. From around that time she realised that her writing had a measurable worth, and put a price on herself.

...

[S]he certainly disliked low wages. She occasionally worked for BBC Radio but in 1932, in a letter to the producer, she refused to write a series of short stories: ‘They really are not profitable. I don’t mind an odd one now and again, but the energy to devise a series is much better employed in writing a couple of books. So there it is!’ This would always be her attitude. She worked extremely hard and, in return, she expected her fair reward."

From Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life by Laura Thompson

Quite right, too. Creators deserve to be paid!

[biglisbonnews]

A Whale Beaches in the Rockaways Why are so many leviathans washing up on the shore? https://www.curbed.com/2023/02/sperm-whale-rockaway-beach-nyc.html

[darklingichor]

A MYSTERIOUS LIFE BY Laura Thompson

A biography of Agetha Christie. I’ve read a lot of her books this year so I figured, why not?

It was very interesting, I didn’t know much about her life beyond her books and that infamous 11 days she went missing.

The book works hard to paint her as a deeply complex person. I get sort of annoyed when biographers do this, because I truly don’t believe a non-complex person exists.

Everyone, and I mean everyone is an amalgum of their life experiences, and not one person who is not a made up character can be anything but complex. Childhood experiences are built on by adult experiences, education and culture of all forms run like a vein though the whole, challenging viewpoints, changing them, confirming them, all wrapped up in a tapestry of social contstructs, manners and expectations. Show me someone who calls people simple and I will show you a person who has their complex head shoved up their simple ass.

From this book it seems like Ms. Christie was a creative, dreamy, sensitive, and yes, very privileged edwardian child. She grew in to a creative and sensitive woman who very much still had the viewpoint of her privileged upbringing. That is not to say she didn’t work hard, she did, she just had a different way of seeing the world. Christie didn’t see the working class less than her, in fact she saw them as wonderful people who did jobs that absolutely needed doing, they were to be respected and appreciated for that work.

Wage working people weren’t beneath her, just separate. *Someone* had to do these jobs, because she certainly couldn’t do them.

Obviously this is not something I agree with. It’s absolutely classism and it’s not right. This is just the “separate but equal ” stuff that is utter fuckwittery because the people this idea targets *aren’t* treated as equal and do not get respect, generally.

However, I do appreciate how up front it is, from what seemed to be Christie’s perspective. This maid, that store clerk, this cook, that Gardner, they aren’t less than, they’re not precived as doing this job because they lack the *ambition * to do something else. They are doing this job, they are skilled in this job, and they deserve respect.

Christie, by account of this book, did treat people well and appreciate what they did. This is backed up by things in her books. Most that I have read take place on wealthy estates. The staff is treated as valuable, and when they aren’t, it is usually acsign that the character being a jerk, is in fact, a jerk.

As someone who has been sneered at, dismissed, ignored, talked down to, and been implied that I am lazy, all because I am not trying to get beyond my hourly job, it would be nice to have the “respect this person doing this job” aspect to become a thing without the gag inducing element of: “They are of this class, they wouldn’t *understand* anything else”. Which, of course is also fuckwittery.

But as usual, this biography told me more about the author than the subject, and this author is really really annoying.

She clearly thought she didn’t have enough material because she repeated things over and over. I heard the same quotes from the same books at least six or seven times… each. She can’t be blamed though because the Christie catalog is so thin (sarcasm font needed).

The thing is, she did have enough material because this book was 20 hours long! Now so was Prarie Fires, about Laura Ingles Wilder, but that author didn’t hit copy/paste every few pages.

The biographers viewpoint hugely biased the narritive as well and she was down right nasty more than once.

Every positive thing was out done by negatives.

Christie was close with her mother. Her mother was devoted to her children.

The book makes the point that up until her father died when she was 12 Agetha had a happy, carefree childhood. A childhood she would long for in later years. The book says that this lack of hardship and idealized view of her childhood shows that Agetha was never permitted to feel disappointment, and so never matures fully. So it’s a bad thing that she has a good childhood.

Obviously Agetha and her siblings should have been shipped off to the work houses, like Dickens. We all know how well adjusted he was.

Agetha herself was a less involved mother, this was also bad, because it showed that she never grew pass being a child herself. Can’t win for losing, it seems.

The author actually spends a lot of time psychoanalyizing Christie.

Agetha did this because of her mother.She did that because of her grandmother.

When writing about Agetha and her first husband Archie Christie’s marriage falling apart, the author went on and on about how Agetha had grown older, she said that Agetha was no longer beautiful, that youth was needed to make her features attractive.

Okay, I looked at pictures of Christie from the time the author is talking about. She’s lovely and honestly reminds me of the Venus De Milo. She’s not unattractive in the slightest.

It couldn’t have been that Agetha and Archie grew apart, or that Archie was an asshole (both true from what I could ferret out of the vitriol of the book). It had to be that Agetha was old, fat, and ugly.

The author then wrote an entire fiction story around the 11 day disappearance.

All she really had to say was that Archie wanted a divorce, distraught Agetha acted rashly, and didn’t seem to be entirely in her right mind when she left letters for Archie and their housekeeper, ran her car into bushes and hopped a train to a spa and chexked in under the name of Archie’s mistress. On some level, she wanted to freak Archie out, so she didn’t say anything to anyone, but she did send a letter explaining everything to Archie’s brother.The brother ignored it, the police got involved and the longer it went on the worse it got until Archie finally found her and concocted a story of amnesia.Her intention wasn’t to capture the country’s attention, it was to keep Archie’s. That’s it.

Instead, we get a day by day, sometimes hour by hour account of what Agetha was doing, what she was thinking. First before she left her house, then when she got into the car, then a long account of what happened before she ditched the car, then when she got on the train, then when she got to the spa and then her time in the spa. 11 days worth of this. Compelling speculative fiction, is not in this author’s wheelhouse.

Then of Agetha’s second marriage, to Max Mallowin, an archeologist 15 years her junior, she did really well for a while, detailing the affection the two had for each other, and examining Agetha’s trust issues after Archie.

And then as we got later into Christie’s life the author started in again on looks. Frequently describing her as “massive” saying how her fat was a defence against pain, how ugly she was.

Really?

She couldn’t have put on weight because she was getting older and that happens, couldn’t have been that she and her husband were comfortable together and both liked to eat, so they did.

Nope, she was fat because it was a protection. And why is that? Because she didn’t like to have her picture taken.

I’ll be sure to let the next person I see avoid the camera to let go of their pain.

And Christie wasn’t massive! Massive is Jaba the Hutt in Empire. She was simply not thin.

And so the fuck what? By the time that the book is talking about, she was in her mid to late 60’s. Leave the woman alone! I don’t care about her looks, and by the sound of it, neither did her husband (though she does go in to great detail about a supposed affair, that even she says there is no evidence that it ever happened).

The bitchines Continues when talking about Max. There is this doubt in the tone that the man could have ever really loved Christie, diminishing the feelings of affection and companionship.

In fact, the author seems obsessed with sex. Taking care to say where Agetha had lost her virginity to Archie, and then pulling out parts of letters to *prove* that Agetha and Max had actually slept together.

Of an aquantince of Max’s who didn’t seem to be interested in sex, the author called her “not normal”.

Of a man that Max had a deep friendship with, who passed away before he met Agetha, the author says that young men often find it easier to fall in love with other men, before moving on to women.

All I could think was: “Or Max just had a deep and important friendship with that guy. Or he was actually in love with him…”

This is a good time to point out that this book was published in 2020.

The author pulls a Koontz and highjacks the reader while she goes into tirades about the lack of moral fiber in today’s culture.

She also goes on and on about how writers are special beings and even though Agetha had really wanted to be an opera singer, she was meant to be one of the special writer class. She may as well as started writing an anecdote about a special writer named Mary Sue Selfinsert because she wasn’t just talking about Christie during these sonnets to a writer, she was stroking her own ego.

Look, I’m not saying that writers *aren’t* unique or valuable, but so are artists, singers, musicians, crafters, actors, etc. *how* one expresses themselves doesn’t make one person better than another.

I did like the parts of the book that were actually about Christie, but the rest…Agetha Christie’s life was interesting, Laura Thompson’s opinions on it are not.

[dailybridgerton]

Benedict looking stupidly cute in Bridgerton Season Three

[likeafantasy]

25 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS (21/25) ↳ love, actually (2003)

[leveloneandup]

The RE-CAP Show: World Cup Edition, 2023

[lithiumrox]

imogen temult 🤝 adaine abernant

fanartists giving characters round glasses worn by the player even though they don't wear glasses in canon

[detectivedeckerstar]

tables are to dimension 20 as doors are to critical role

[nathalieskinoblog]

Little Women 1933 - 2019

[rosebug3]

Cast of Bye Bye Birdie at the Kennedy Center teen heartthrob crush.

link:

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[living400lbs]

"‘Things have to happen to all of us . . . That’s the way life is. You just have to take it. Some of us can, some of us can’t.’ So Agatha wrote in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, and, having been one of the people who couldn’t ‘take it’, she thereafter remade herself into one of those who could. At the root of this shift was her writing. That was her refuge, her protection, her outlet: her real life."

From Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life by Laura Thompson

[celluloidrainbow]

BRUSHFIRES (2004) dir. Wendy Jo Carlton, Aprill Winney, Ai Lene Chor, Maria Gigante, Laura Lonigro, Amber Mohammad, & Etta Worthington When a shy girl, secretly in love with her rocker-grrl housemate, meets an unbalanced heiress on the run, anything could (and does) happen. (link in title)

[queen-daya]

Every Shot of Michelle Jones (Part 6/♾️)

[demon64]

You know what would be cool? An animated adaptation of the Circle of Four story, the one with these four in Vegas fighting Blackheart.

I have read this story before, and let me just say, that from what I remember, it could use some streamlining. It got a bit overcomplicated. Also, you kinda gotta admit, this fusion of powers would really cool to see:

Kinda wish Laura was a bit in on this fusion of powers, but whatever, sometimes your favorite gets the short end of the stick.

I think all these four would be great to have adapted into the story, but if you felt like having other characters with similar abilities in the limelight, I suggest:

Robbie Reyes swapped with Alejandra Blaze

Daken/Akihiro swapped with Laura Kinney/X-23

Red Harpy swapped with Red Hulk

And Mania swapped with Agent Venom

I'd prefer if you kept the four from the first image, since all deserve the recognition, especially Alejandra