The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie

I continue to struggle with my reading. I'm finding it hard to stick with books. Last week I started the next book for my Women in Translation book club, Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami. I am enjoying it, but when I got to the end of part one yesterday, I wanted to take a break and read something different. I had time: my book club meeting isn't for two weeks. I picked up this little edition of The Mysterious Affair at Styles with its beautiful cover art from a tiny free library in Poncha Springs, Colorado. My father and I pulled over there briefly and took a spin through town as a small break on our long drive from La Puebla, New Mexico to Manitou Springs, Colorado. 

I'm not sure I have an entire post's worth of things to say about The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It's Agatha Christie's first novel, but I don't know that I've read enough of her to compare it to her later works in any meaningful way. I've watched the entirety of the Poirot TV series, but I believe this is only the third Poirot book I've read (Murder on the Orient Express and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd being the others). Captain Hastings, a character familiar to me from the TV show, doesn't appear in either of the Poirot books I'd read, so this was my first introduction to him as the Poirot narrator. Christie is very clever in making the reader aware of Hastings' shortcomings as a detective even as he is the one telling us the story. I haven't read Arthur Conan Doyle, but I imagine Christie was inspired by his Dr. Watson's function as a narrator and the somewhat thick sidekick to a brilliant mind. 

I read The Mysterious Affair at Styles in the space of an afternoon and now I must decide if I go right back to Breasts and Eggs or start something new. Maybe short stories are the answer for this moment in my life.