Agatha Christie

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Re: Agatha Christie

Post by 70s-child »

Endless Night is a fantastic book, but I think you might be too young to really understand it, Darrell. Have you read any Christies so far?
pete9012S wrote: 1.1925 The Secret of Chimneys
2.1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
3.1930 The Mysterious Mr.Quin
4.1931 The Sittaford Mystery
5.1932 Peril at End House
6.1932 Parker Pyne Investigates
7.1937 Death on the Nile
8.1944 Towards Zero
9.1961 The Pale Horse
10.1967 Endless Night
I agree with 8, 9, and 10 in this list. :D They are truly among best Christies.
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Re: Agatha Christie

Post by pete9012S »

I'm looking for an Agatha Christie story-I'm pretty sure it was a short story where Poirot was asked to investigate a murder/theft at a house in the country.

Anyway,Poirot has nothing to go on as it were and spends the days searching the carpets and staircase with a magnifying glass.He then shouts out something like 'eureka' and declares he has found something that will solve the case.

In fact he has found nothing-but this ploy succeeds in flushing out the real murderer/thief ....

Anyone remember which book this story is in at all?????
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Re: Agatha Christie

Post by Darrell71 »

70s-child wrote:Endless Night is a fantastic book, but I think you might be too young to really understand it, Darrell. Have you read any Christies so far?

No only Endless Night. But yeah, I didn't understand much, but I've kept it for later on.
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Re: Agatha Christie

Post by pete9012S »

This is Christie's own personal top-ten.....

And Then There Were None
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
A Murder is Announced
Murder on the Orient Express
The Thirteen Problems
Towards Zero
Endless Night
Crooked House
Ordeal by Innocence
The Moving Finger
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Re: Agatha Christie

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Sorry, Pete - no bells are ringing from your description.
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Re: Agatha Christie

Post by pete9012S »

Here are links to some Agatha Christie sites...

Some of these sites haven’t updated for a while but you may still enjoy pootling about and reading about Agatha Christie…

Tea Time Christie Style (I would love to go here!)

http://christieinayear.blogspot.co.uk/2 ... style.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Other sites...

http://www.amazon.com/forum/agatha%20ch ... 3CW8CI770L" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



http://agathachristie.com/forum/have-your-say/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


http://theagathachristieforums.yuku.com/forums/1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



http://www.all-about-agatha-christie.co ... forum.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



http://jdcarr.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


http://www.englishriviera.co.uk/agathac ... e-festival" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


http://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournem ... ent=563369" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.agathachristie.co.nr/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Anyone now any other sites??
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Re: Agatha Christie

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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/agatha_agape/messages" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AgathaChr ... =278028163" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.poirot.us/index.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Thanks, Pete - I will explore your selection later!
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Re: Agatha Christie

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A must-read for this time of the year is Hercule Poirot's Christmas. Also catch the excellent TV adaptation as well, if you can!
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Re: Agatha Christie

Post by pete9012S »

Which TV Christie is on over CHRISTmas?

I'm reading The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding.There are two versions of this story.I'm trying to locate them at present....

The popular version is in the 1960 novel The Adventure of The Christmas Pudding which itself was a slight re-write of an earlier version from the 1930's.The story was also serialised in a magazine in the 1930's I think.
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Re: Agatha Christie at Christmas

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pete9012S wrote:Which TV Christie is on over CHRISTmas?
Shouldn't that be, "Which TV CHRISTie is in over CHRISTmas, Pete? :wink:

As for Christie's over Christmas, I must peruse the Christmas Radio Times and find out! :D
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Re: Agatha Christie

Post by Julie2owlsdene »

Hasn't Hercule Poirot's Christmas just been shown on one of the sky channels?

8)
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Re: Agatha Christie

Post by pete9012S »

tiq wrote:
Regarding the "Christie Mystery" It would be interesting to see if someone could produce the examples I requested from one of her novels or even from a Blyton story



tiq,here are some references for your perusal.....
Apparently there was a documentary entitled 'The Agatha Christie Code'....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ... uroscience


Ben Goldacre
The Guardian, Saturday 21 January 2006 writes:

I seem to have opened up a whole new front of bad science by looking into the high end hi-fi industry, but that will have to wait for next week. "Scientists claimed yesterday that they have solved the mystery behind the success of Agatha Christie's novels," says the Telegraph. "Novelist Agatha Christie used words that invoked a chemical response in readers and made her books 'literally unputdownable', scientists have said," according to the BBC.

What could this chemical response be? Who did these astonishing experiments? Over to the Sunday Times: "The study by neuro-linguists at the universities of London, Birmingham and Warwick shows that she peppered her prose with phrases that act as a trigger to raise levels of serotonin and endorphins, the chemical messengers in the brain that induce pleasure and satisfaction. 'Christie's language patterns stimulate higher than usual activity in the brain,' said Dr Roland Kapferer, who coordinated the research. 'The release of these neurological opiates makes Christie's writing literally unputdownable'."

This important work was to be revealed in a documentary, The Agatha Christie Code, on ITV1, over Christmas. I watched it: nothing. They don't mention the words "serotonin", "endorphin", or even the clumsy neophrasism "neurological opiates". The closest they come is when some hypnotist called Paul McKenna says: "I believe the main reason Agatha Christie is so successful is because of the pattern of addiction that she creates in her readers through brain chemistry." Oh, and a self-help guru is introduced as "an expert in a new science of language, neurolinguistic programming", but he doesn't say much.

In fact, the sole substance of their research into the "science of Agatha Christie's success", was counting up how often she used different words in her books: it turns out that Christie used simple words, like "said" instead of "replied", and this made her books a bit easier to read and, er, hypnotic.

But where did all these authoritative neuroscience quotes come from? Clearly I had to get hold of "project leader Dr Roland Kapferer PhD". He was difficult to track down, as he is not a neuroscientist but an "associate producer" in TV, and writer of this show. I asked him what was the evidence for his neuroscience-heavy quotes in the newspapers?

His response was so extraordinary that I have reproduced it for your amusement here: http://www.badscience.net" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. First, he told me that this neuroscience stuff was a joke, and we should have all been media savvy enough to know that.

Then he told me the journalists writing about his programme had misrepresented him. The Sunday Times article, in particular, "was not a particularly accurate report on what I said". Ouch. Just to be absolutely clear, I've also posted his press release for the show in full on badscience.net for you to read yourself. Amongst other guff this press release contains phrases such as: "... higher than usual activity in the brain. These phrases act as a trigger to raise levels of serotonin and endorphins, the chemical messengers in the brain that induce pleasure and satisfaction. The release of these neurological opiates makes Christie's writing literally unputdownable".

Then finally, Kapferer gets all philosophical. "Like Jerry Fodor I'm dubious about a lot of the popular excitement regarding fMRI and PET and it was partly my intention to lampoon the very idea of PET as a way of understanding human creativity." Right. "This goes also for the discussion of seretonin [sic] and endorphins and all the stuff about 'brain activity'." Hmm. "Following Paul Feyerabend I would argue that science knows no 'bare facts'. And no such clearly defined process as a 'scientific method'. Even the definitions of 'experiment', 'evidence' etc vary wildly."

Did I order this? No. I asked for some reasonable evidence to support his outlandish assertions about serotonin and Agatha Christie. None was forthcoming


Also see this article....

December 26, 2005
The Agatha Christie Code: Stylometry, serotonin and the oscillation overthruster

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ... 02728.html

Agatha Christie, who died in 1976, has been in the news a lot lately. Atai Winkler's "research" for lulu.com on the statistics of book titles, discussed on Language Log a couple of weeks ago, gave rise to some of the headlines, for example "Computer Model Names Agatha Christie's 'Sleeping Murder' as 'The Perfect Title' for a Best-Seller". But others reference a different piece of techno-literary sleuthing. Richard Brooks of the Sunday Times tells us, in "Agatha Christie's grey cells mystery", that "leading universities" have discovered that Christie's appeal is due to "the chemical messengers in the brain that induce pleasure and satisfaction":

The mystery behind Agatha Christie’s enduring popularity may have been solved by three leading universities collaborating on a study of more than 80 of her crime novels.

Despite her worldwide sales of two billion, critics such as the crime writer P D James pan her writing style and “cardboard cut-out” characters. But the study by neuro-linguists at the universities of London, Birmingham and Warwick shows that she peppered her prose with phrases that act as a trigger to raise levels of serotonin and endorphins, the chemical messengers in the brain that induce pleasure and satisfaction.

Some might think that this is a complicated way of saying that people like the way she writes, but I'll reserve judgment until I see how the researchers themselves put it.

Meanwhile, Russell Jackson in The Scotsman takes a different tack in "Experts solve mystery of Agatha Christie's success". Apparently "linguistics experts" have discovered that the secret is a mathematical formula:

The study was carried out by linguistics experts at Warwick, Birmingham and London universities and the results are to be revealed in an ITV1 documentary on 27 December.

Dr Roland Kapferer, the project's leader, said: "It is extraordinary just how timeless and popular Agatha Christie's books remain. These initial findings indicate that there is a mathematical formula that accounts for her success."

Again, this seems to be a complicated way of saying that Christie's success is due to identifiable properties of her writing, rather than a special intervention of divine providence in the marketplace. I haven't read the rest of the news reports, but no doubt other journalists have explained that Ms. Christie's enduring success has been shown to be an emergent property of the arrangements of atoms and molecules in the printed copies of her works.

This 12/19/2005 news release from the University of Birmingham explains more about the formulae involved: this part is apparently work by Pernilla Danielsson, a computational linguist in the Department of English:

Agatha Christie used a limited vocabulary, repetition, short sentences and a large amount of dialogue in her text according to research carried out by the University of Birmingham for ITV 1’s special Christmas programme about the author.

Dr Pernilla Danielsson from the University’s Department of English has analysed the type of words that Christie used in her detective novels to develop a better understanding of her writing style and to find out why she is the world’s best selling author. To do this she has also compared Christie’s writing to that of Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Hound of the Baskervilles.

This sounds like a plausible project in stylometry, but there's nothing about it yet in any of Dr. Danielsson's works that Google or Google Scholar can find. And the Birmingham press release doesn't mention anything about serotonin or endorphins.

I couldn't find anything about this project on the University of Warwick's web site, or various of the University of London's sites. A search for "Agatha Project" on Google Scholar and other indices of scientific and technical publications turned up only some references to a completely different "Agatha Project", an old HP expert system for diagnosing PA-RISC processor board failures.

And I couldn't find anything anywhere about Dr. Roland Kapferer, "the project's leader", unless he's the Roland Kapferer referenced here as a "film and television producer and freelance writer based in London and Sydney", with "a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Macquarie", who may also be the same as the Roland Kapferer who is the lead singer for Professor Groove and the Booty Affair. If so, then he's a sort of real-world Buckaroo Banzai: could the rest of the Hong Kong Cavaliers be somewhere in the background, measuring those serotonin levels?

The ITV1 program " The Agatha Christie Code" is being "revealed" tomorrow at 16:00, so perhaps some British readers will be able to provide additional information about this research. Who, for example, is responsible for the "neuro" aspect? How did they measure serotonin and endorphins, or is that all journalistic free association? Is there going to be a publication at some point, or was this research done exclusively for the ITV Special? And has anyone seen Penny Priddy?

So far, the "Agatha Project" shares a crucial negative feature with the Lulu Titlescorer and last fall's "infomania study": there's no publication or documentation. No equations, no published data, no fitted models, no source code. Just press releases and (in the case of Agatha) a TV program. Until what they did is documented in enough detail for others to evaluate, the press reports are the same category as Professor Hikita's Oscillation Overthruster: evocative fiction. Looking on the bright side, I guess it's nice to see some popular evocative fiction with a linguistic theme.

[Update: the BBC, vying with The Sunday Timies in earnest credulity, provides some juicy details apparently supplied by Dr. Kapferer -- a few of the specific "language patterns" which "stimulated higher than usual activity in the brain" and "triggered a pleasure response".

The team found that common phrases used by Christie acted as a trigger to raise levels of serotonin and endorphins, the chemical messengers in the brain that induce pleasure and satisfaction.

These phrases included "can you keep an eye on this", "more or less", "a day or two" and "something like that".

"The release of these neurological opiates makes Christie's writing literally unputdownable," Dr Kapferer said.

If it weren't so obviously unethical -- and also so obviously ineffective -- I'd suggest a small experiment at your local watering hole:
You: Can you keep an eye on this while I visit the restroom?
Attractive potential new friend: Um, OK.
You: You seem trustworthy, more or less.
A.P.N.F.: [uneasily] Uh huh...
You: I won't be gone more than a day or two.
A.P.N.F.: Visiting the restroom.
You: Something like that.

Intoxicated by potent neurological opiates, your new friend will be thenceforth be addicted to your company. Really, the BBC says so. ]

[Update: more on this here.] Posted by Mark Liberman at December 26, 2005 08:24 AM

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ... 02731.html

December 27, 2005
The brave new world of computational neurolinguistics

Yesterday I wrote about an ITV documentary, airing today, that promises to unveil some weird-sounding "neurolinguistic" research on the endorphin-stimulating effects of Agatha Christie's prose style. I asked British readers for more information, and even before seeing the program, Ray Girvan was able to help:

Being commissioned for a ITV documentary marking the 75h anniversary of the creation of Miss Marple, the exercise has "promotional" written all over it. ITV has an ongoing coproduction agreement with Chorion plc, rights owners and makers of Agatha Christie TV films.

The premise of the enduring popularity of Christie's text doesn't entirely bear scrutiny. Sales of her books were declining in the late 1990s, and have only risen again after extensive rebranding and promotion by Chorion plc, who bought the rights in 1999.



Now why didn't the Times, the Guardian, the BBC and the rest of the British mainstream media give us this sensible account of the commercial forces behind the Agatha "research"?

Take a look at the breathless BBC story headlined "Scientists study Christie success". Its subhead was "Novelist Agatha Christie used words that invoked a chemical response in readers and made her books 'literally unputdownable', scientists have said." The lead sentence was "A neurolinguistic study of more than 80 of her novels concluded that her phrases triggered a pleasure response".

The BBC article gives us no hint that ITV has a financial interest in the "enduring popularity" of Christie's work. The article is in the entertainment section, not the science section or the business section; but a majority of readers will surely see it as a story about the popularization of scientific research, not a story about a public relations stunt in support of a commercial partnership. (There may well be some real science behind the program -- I'll reserve judgment on that until the work is described somewhere in enough detail to evaluate.)

Well, I've made a New Year's resolution to look on the bright side, so I'm going stop berating science journalism at the BBC-- clearly a lost cause -- and focus instead on the wonderful new opportunity here for enterprising teams of computational and neurological linguists.

The recipe is simple. Take one fading literary property with a cash-rich proprietor, one statistical string analysis algorithm, and a sheaf of brain images with hot and cool color patches. Mix well. Sprinkle with neurotransmitters; add sex and violence to taste; and serve on a bed of fresh press releases.

A few years in the future, I look forward to reading the first of a veritable river of publications from the Doubleday Institute of Computational Neurolinguistics at UCSC: Pullum, G. et al., "The obsessive-compulsive code: effects of anarthrous noun phrases on striatal dopamine D2 receptors".

[I should stress that the neuroscience of language is an eminently respectable field, where rigorous and exciting work is being done; and that integration of advanced computational techniques into this field is one of its most promising areas. In this post, I'm poking fun at a case where press reports suggest that the field is being exploited for publicity purposes by a partnership of media companies.]

[Update: Ray Girvan emailed:

I watched the programme, and updated my weblog entry with the notes I made. I admit I'm biased - I think Agatha Christie's work is execrable - but the programme was nevertheless very poor science.

They did various computer analyses of word and phrase distribution: pretty standard computational linguistics stuff. The shaky part was the interpretation of the results by various non-mainstream pundits - a Lacanian psychoanalyst, a stage hypnotist, and two Neuro-linguistic Programming experts - who all asserted that the observed word distributions literally hypnotised the reader.

In his weblog entry, Ray Girvan describes the program at greater length:

The main experts were computational linguist Dr Pernilla Danielsson (billed as "academic champion of communications") and Dr Markus Dahl, a research fellow (a Johnny Depp lookalike, including top hat) at the University of London Institute of English Studies. The camera tracked around them portentously as they sat at glowing laptops in a dimly-lit smoky room and, bit by bit, revealed the purported secret of Christie's success. As LL guessed, Dr Roland Kapferer wasn't among them; he was revealed in the credits as the associate producer/writer for the programme.

The science boiled down to a) computerised textual analysis - word frequencies, and so on - and b) subjective psychological interpretation of the results thereof. Christie's nearly invariable use of "said", rather than said-bookisms, was claimed to enable readers to concentrate on the plot. Her works' narrow range on a 3D scatter plot (axes and variables unknown) indicated a consistent style, assumed to be a Good Thing compared to Arthur Conan Doyle. Sudden coherent sections in her otherwise messy notebook indicated her getting "into the flow" - a trancelike writing state (Darian Leader, a psychoanalyst, endorsed the idea that she had been in a similar, deeper trance during her famous 10-day disappearance) and Dr Dahl argued that this trance transferred to the reader.

The trance theory was the central thrust of the programme. David Shephard, a Master Trainer in Neurolinguistic Programming, asserted that the level of repetition of key concepts over small spaces (e.g "life", "living", "live", "death" in a couple of paragraphs) consolidated concepts in the reader's mind. He claimed further that we can only hold nine concepts in the mind at once (I assume a reference to Miller's classic Seven plus or minus two figure for short-term memory capacity) and that Christie's use of more than nine characters overloads the reader's conscious mind, making them literally go into a trance. Dr Dahl cited a further textual result - Christie's "ingenious device" of controlling the reading speed by decreasing the level of detail toward the ends of books, and stage hypnotist Paul McKenna claimed that this invoked the neurotransmitters of craving and release, making the books addictive.

Finally they rolled out the big gun, Dr Richard Bandler, "father of Neurolinguistic Programming", who repeated the assertion of Christie literally hypnotising readers, and said the lack of detail helped maintain that trance. And that was it: "extensive computer analysis", concluded the Joanna Lumley voiceover, has enabled a "quantum leap" in understanding the source of Christie's enduring popularity. Why, surely only a cynic could remain unconvinced by such rigorous science...

I expect we Americans will be able to see this on the Discovery Channel or the History Channel before long. If so, my New Year's Resolution to focus on the positive side of linguistics in the media will be subjected to a rigorous test. ]

A lot to digest there tiq,hope this info helps!

Regards

Pete

ps I particularly liked the lines:

the Sunday Times: "The study by neuro-linguists at the universities of London, Birmingham and Warwick shows that she peppered her prose with phrases that act as a trigger to raise levels of serotonin and endorphins, the chemical messengers in the brain that induce pleasure and satisfaction. 'Christie's language patterns stimulate higher than usual activity in the brain,' said Dr Roland Kapferer, who coordinated the research. 'The release of these neurological opiates makes Christie's writing literally unputdownable'."


Not forgetting....


The recipe is simple. Take one fading literary property with a cash-rich proprietor, one statistical string analysis algorithm, and a sheaf of brain images with hot and cool color patches. Mix well. Sprinkle with neurotransmitters; add sex and violence to taste; and serve on a bed of fresh press releases. :wink:
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Re: Agatha Christie

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The Agatha Christie Christmas Newletter is now available online, and may be of interest to you AC fans. You can subscribe to it, free of charge, from the website.
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Re: Agatha Christie at Christmas

Post by pete9012S »

Moonraker wrote: Shouldn't that be, "Which TV CHRISTie is in over CHRISTmas, Pete? :wink:
That was a very good one indeed! You been at the eggnog?! :D
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Re: Agatha Christie

Post by tix »

On Dec 20th 2012, pete9012S wrote:
" ... here are some references for your perusal ..."

****************************

Thank you for those. The "Guardian" one came up but when I put 'Christie' into the "search" facility for a page reference there were no results although the article you printed may be the one I was looking for seeing it's by a "Ben Goldacre of The Guardian." The others came up as "Not Found," but I'll try again.

I had read the one placed in the Forum but unfortunately it went a little over my head!

Phrases such as "peppered her prose with phrases that act as a trigger to raise levels of serotonin and endorphins," tell me that someone may be making a mountain out of a molehill.

- and when it gets to "Stylometry, serotonin and the oscillation overthruster" I began to think that someone's trying to see just how far they can go to prove we'll believe anything. Either that, or I'm a "Bear of Very Little Brain" because I look askance at this paragraph:

"The science boiled down to a) computerised textual analysis - word frequencies, and so on - and b) subjective psychological interpretation of the results thereof. Christie's nearly invariable use of "said", rather than said-bookisms, was claimed to enable readers to concentrate on the plot. Her works' narrow range on a 3D scatter plot (axes and variables unknown) indicated a consistent style, assumed to be a Good Thing compared to Arthur Conan Doyle. Sudden coherent sections in her otherwise messy notebook indicated her getting "into the flow" - a trancelike writing state (Darian Leader, a psychoanalyst, endorsed the idea that she had been in a similar, deeper trance during her famous 10-day disappearance) and Dr Dahl argued that this trance transferred to the reader."

I also look askance at this one but I may not be up with the play - those who are into 'Christie' may be having a bit of fun -

"A few years in the future, I look forward to reading the first of a veritable river of publications from the Doubleday Institute of Computational Neurolinguistics at UCSC: Pullum, G. et al., "The obsessive-compulsive code: effects of anarthrous noun phrases on striatal dopamine D2 receptors."

The two examples you mentioned at the end pretty well said it all and speaking of "said" (as opposed to "replied") I can't really make anything from it. I think the majority of writers use "said" more often than any other related word and I also believe they tend to use different words when appropriate - I can see no particular formula in this respect pertaining to Agatha Christie.

Incidentally the way the treatise is written with its big words and scientific alignment reminded me very much of another analyst.

The "simple writing" and the "use of small words" aspects can be analyzed (as above) or the researcher can go out into the field - as I did.

My approach was to read books by both authors. I had read Blyton stuff for a long time and liked it.

I'd been aware of Agatha Christie over the years as most people have because she's an extremely well respected author and having heard one of her very famous "Who Dun It" stories parodied in "Take it from Here" I thought I'd see what it was all about, so in December of 2011 I bought my very first book and read it.

Unfortunately I became bogged down. Kept forgetting who was who (whom was whom?? who was whom??), and wasn't able to relate things properly - but that's quite a common occurrence in my case.

"The release of these neurological opiates makes Christie's writing literally unputdownable".

I would certainly have been able to put it down no problem, but didn't want to opt out of my "research" halfway through the book, so I carried on to the end.

All in all, it was a failure.

So whether or not she wrote similarly to Blyton with "small words" and the rest that makes up the analysis, can be isolated in this 'particular' case by the result:

I like 'Blyton,' but I can't really cotton on to 'Christie!'

I concluded (without using involved and obscure words) that an author appeals according to the makeup of his or her readers; how they relate to life, how they think, their likes, dislikes, outlook, and so on. The way something is written may also be accepted positively according to the education of the reader.

My non-acceptance of 'Christie' however, is neither here nor there because I've experienced this with Blyton - some kids simply don't "take" to her (isn't that incredible?) and anyway, it'd be a pretty boring world if everyone liked everything to the same degree. If we were all of a mind there'd probably be very little posted on the Enid Blyton Forums, and that'd be a great pity.
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