My last 5 books: Mix-bag of fantasy, mystery, sci-fi and horror

1. A Thief in the Night, by David Chandler. I read the first book in this series, Den of Thieves, years ago, but the plot of that book was so simple and straight-forward that it carried straight over to this one and the small scattered hints in this book was enough for me to remember the whole thing. My initial thoughts when I started to read this book was that it read like a D&D adventure and the characters were pretty straight-forward D&D stereotypes; the sweet but dense knight, the sly thief, the cunning dwarf, the wise magic apprentice, and the barbarian who solves everything with violence. But just like in the last book I fell in love with Malden and I discovered that every part of the book that was just Malden, Cythera and Slag were amazing, and every part of it involving Croy and Mörget a lot less so. It read like a D&D adventure all the way through, but when the mystery evolved just over halfway through the book (around 275 pages in) things started to get really interesting and I found the book hard to put down. It's a good many-layered mystery reaching through the ages and those are great. There were a few instances where I was just waiting for the characters to catch up, where I had figured out where the story was going and they didn't know yet, but I wasn't so much further ahead of the characters that it became annoying. They caught up pretty quickly. All in all I did enjoy this book and I will pick up the third part eventually.

2. Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie. This was an old Swedish translation that I got from my grandmother years ago. I really, really don't agree with the translation and half of the time I spent reading this was spent sighing in frustration at the translator's choice of words (and so many direct translations omg). The translation definitely lowers the overall grade of this book. When it comes to the plot I already knew it. I've seen several screen adaptations of this novel, the latest being the one starring Kenneth Branagh and Daisy Ridley. I still enjoy seeing the seemingly random clues come together and this book is probably the absolute best way to see the brilliance of Poirot's mind and Christie's pen. Who can pass up on a good whodunit story? :3

3. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke. This is a classic and a book I got from Blind Date. I saw the movie adaptation of this when I was around ten years old, and it was the strangest movie 10-year-old me had ever seen. I don't remember much of the movie, just the general dislike of too much weird, which put me off from reading the book. But when I got it from Blind Date I figured I might as well read it. And this book gave me the same feeling like Star Trek TOS and classic Doctor Who; gotta love the 1960's hope for the future! The book starts off with what's basically two prologues; one taking place in prehistoric times, and one taking place two years before the rest of the book. The connection between those two prologues and the rest of the story isn't immediately clear, but the pieces fit together perfectly as the story moves along. I love how the majority of the story is just basic space exploration (which features a renegade AI) before moving into a Lovecraftian Randolph Carter-esque ending. Did Bowman find the Silver Key somehere in the rings of Saturn? ;P From someone who isn't very much into sci-fi; I really liked this book (a lot more than I thought I would).

4. Classic Victorian & Edwardian Ghost Stories.
I love old-fashioned ghost stories and I'm happy to say that I had only read one of the tales included in this anthology before; The Tell-Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe. I never pick this sort of book up to get scared, but mostly to enjoy the old-fashioned story-telling and hopefully to get a few chills. As expected the stories I did enjoy the most were the two by Charles Dickens and the two by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; especially Narrative of a Ghost of Hand, which gave me such chills and stayed with me for a whole day. Man-Size in Marble by Edith Nesbit also gave me chills. Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost was a wtf scenario, but was obviously meant as a comedy. The levity of this story was much appreciated after all the doom and gloom which had been the book up until this point. The last story was Laura by Saki. It was extremely short, but very strange, and I'm not sure what to make of it. These were the stories that stood out to me especially, but I feel like if I go to honorary mentions it will be the rest of the book, however The Spectre of Tappington gets a mention for having a pants-obsessed ghost; A School Story gets a mention for having a perfect dun-dun-DUUUUN movie-ending, and Eveline's Visitant gets a mention for being so heart-wrenchingly romantically told.

5. And Another Thing..., by Eoin Colfer. As far as I'm concerned Hitchhiker's Guide should've ended after the second book. Everything after that was a tedious chore of reading and unfortunately this wasn't any better. I went in expecting nothing, but against all better knowledge hoping for something good. I planned on giving this book 100 pages, but I couldn't even get to 70 before I gave up. Seventy pages and literally nothing had happened, except for some painfully forced tongue-in-cheek writing that mostly served to annoy me because it was so bad. ugh