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I kind of know what is going to happen, but I don’t really. We are now hearing the tale of Heathcliff’s upbringing from his former housekeeper. This disastrous affair at the Linton’s explains how Catherine fell in with them at the first place, an adventure that I assume Heathcliff will come to regret.

Gothic core, lol. The opening of this is like half of the tales in Classic Ghost Stories where the narrator pays a social visit to a place that is obviously kicking out bad vibes. He is an entitled prick, great for bringing out the worst in Heathcliff’s surly crew, including the 17 year old girl who pretends to be a witch, hexing the old servant (!).

Soooo I know of this book through cultural osmosis (I recall a Monty Python bit where Heathcliff and… Catherine? were signaling to each other in semaphore) and because my sister had to read it for what I believe was their 8th grade novel (we had A Tale of Two Cities. After exhausting Austen I am excited to get into the works of the Brontë sisters!

“Triangle At Rhodes”

We open with Poirot slathering sunscreen on one of a pair of single women as they are all in Italy on their own vacations. There’s a lot of gossip and an apparent, blooming love triangle. A triangle whose angles add up to 180 degrees of murder.

“Dead Man’s Mirror”

This is a fun accusing parlor-type story that also has a cameo from Mr. Satterthwaite from Three Act Tragedy. Poirot has to figure out who staged a suicide to cover for a murder and I don’t mind telling you that I had NO inkling toward the guilty party. It’s a wonder how many Poirot stories tend to end in soap opera-style reveals.

“The Incredible Theft”

I KNEW that I read this story! Or, rather, the short story that Christie expanded it from—“The Submarine Plans”, which I read in The Grey Cells of M. Poirot. This is a fun story and memorable for Poirot’s banter as well as a goofy moment where a young French maid hits on Poirot, still winking after he rebuffs her. Dang, I wanna read more of these expanded stories!

“Murder in the Mews”

I like this book’s format! The novella-length cases are more satisfying than the short stories in The Grey Cells. This case has a pretty good major twist and I appreciate that this one focuses on Japp as the sidekick as you get a better sense of the purposefully-bumbling-inspector solving cases within his means but always eager for Poirot’s cryptic input.

I wasn’t sure how Miller was gonna handle the story after Patroclus’s death but an earth-bound shade is, well, about as straightforward as anything. I wonder, like, is there an opportunity for a narrative somewhere where the shades of Patroclus and Hector have a dialogue while Achilles is mourning? I can’t imagine that it hasn’t been done before, maybe as a poem?

oh lord Patroclus really busted out the “If you love me—“

like I know he has good intentions in trying to save the Greeks as well as Achilles’s legacy and it’s not him trying to be emotionally manipulative. it is more how the toxicity of this relationship is revealing itself.

Here we go!! I was way wrong about what motivated Achilles a hundred or so pages ago, thinking that the death of Iphigenia could be a catalyst for how Miller might complicate the plot, but what happens it is fitting in with his utter lack of compassion. The story starts to make more sense when you have Achilles the man fated for greatness but doomed to die young.

the portrayal of the years leading up to the Iliad is pretty good. I was wondering why Patroclus hadn’t ended up in the surgeon’s tent sooner. There is some sort of love triangle blooming here with Briseis but I have no idea how Miller is going to get to the tantrum. is Patroclus going to fall in love with her? He has demonstrated a capacity for compassion for women, something Achilles had not before Iphigenia.

oh lol Patroclus is the one who asks for it. I guess the way Miller has been writing Achilles’s character, distanced in his heroism, it would not be up to him to offer his compassion… but, ten years from now, when Agamemnon tries to take her, we will see how he reacts. Miller already foreshadowed this with the early dialogue about the lyre.

okay I think I can see where this is going (I mean I a lot of this is enshrined within mythology, just not the exact motives all the time). Achilles is going to take a war bride during the Troy raids as his own way to perform restitution for Iphigenia.

😬😬😬 ihpigenia, heartbreakingly rendered in Elektra. Will she be spared death in this retelling? I have no freakin’ clue.

Odysseus is a lovable dickbag, clashing with Diomedes. I don’t recall Diomedes as a major character. Him wounding Aphrodite was important but it didn’t leave as big of an impression as it should have, I guess.

After reading so many female-centric Greek retellings - I mean, three of them were centered around Medusa - the super-gay love story of Achilles and Patroclus, uncomfortable sexual coercion by Deidameia aside, is refreshing and fun. Because this is about two young men, the theme of women being at the mercy of men and only getting double-edged succor from the Gods, if that, is absent.

Fun with Chiron!! I don’t know how much of the specifics of Achilles and Patroclus’s life together is detailed in mythology. It wasn’t delved into much in the major sources that I’ve read, The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Ancient Greek Gods and Heroes. Certainly it will be worth reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as Bullfinch’s Mythology to get a better, broader picture.

I like the scene of Patroclus meeting Thetis. She looks monstrous to him, with the description about her mouth sticking out in particular. Whether this is how she appears to Achilles or is just done to scare Patroclus is up for debate. Certainly, the story of Peleus suggests that she could be much scarier if she wanted to, so that the image presented to Patroclus is both desirable beauty as well as horror.

Patroclus’s portrayal has a lot in common with YA heroines in his abuse, meager beginnings, self-loathing, and OH MY GOODNESS WHY WOULD HE PICK ME 😍 (exaggeration my own) but, being a male in Ancient Greece, even with his exile taken to account, he has more social freedom than any Grecian woman, so it all hits a bit different.

oh okay so we are starting out with the betrothal of Helen. Jennifer Saint retold it in Elektra but this time it’s as seen through the eyes of a 9 yr old

Less an overarching plot and more just Kiki’s various hardships and memorable tasks that she encounters alongside the unique people, like the washer-woman / handywoman and the belly-band mother.

The pace of this book is brisk and the situations are very cute. Except I guess for the panic at the beach. Tombo is… idk, obviously crushing on her. And her first real meeting him he had stolen her broom and even wore a dress like hers to try to fly! Did he steal her other slipper?? He seems kind of gross.

It’s adorable and I like how matter of fact Kadono handles witchcraft, and making her dad a folklore specialist allows the story to do a bit of theorycrafting about how magic works in her world. The interplay between Kiki and her mother with Kiki wanting to make her own decisions is so straightforward; subtext is for cowards.

Okay I was wrong about the blind grandmother from No One but this 50 pages references the hanging from Leaf Storm and the time of the birds smashing into houses and also has the account of the withdrawal of the banana plantation and the catastrophes that gutted Macondo from its prior prosperity including the massacre of some 3,000 workers and their families as well as a four-year deluge.

I had no idea, I thought at first that the title of this story was about an isolated town that had kept to its own dramas, but this is about the painful solitude of every member of the Buendia clan, expressed in one way or another as they are either incapable of relating to others or are inscrutable themselves or remove themselves from society, alone with their tormented passions.

Extracts include the miracle of the departure of Remedios the Beauty, the deaths of nearly all of Aureliano’s bastard sons through some sort of bizarre almost mythological plot, and the coming of the Leaf Storm that ultimately leaves the town destitute during the telling of the Leaf Storm novel. I wasn’t sure before but Ursula has become one of my favorite characters in the story, and I think she is about to die.

the horrid lifetime of revolution that Aureliano subjects the country to ends in this segment, with a nod to No One Writes to the Colonel and his quest for his pension. I love the intersections with Marquez’s shorter stories. Macondo seems impossibly dense and rich with history as Marquez weaves things into this timeline. I have no idea where this is all headed… but I know that the Buendia clan is cursed.

OMG ITS THE COLONEL, THE COLONEL FROM NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL, RIGHT? THE GUY WHO DELIVERED THE TREASURY?????

It’s a sneaky book when it hits you with an extract from one of Marquez’s short stories. I had no recollection that Rebeca and Jose Arcadio were from the story of the dying birds and the parable of the Wandering Jew and it is kind of sobering to see it brought up, as though there is a sort of raw magic and fable at the beginning of the book that has in some way dwindled with Jose Arcadio Buendia’s death.

This book is beautiful and wonderful but it has incredibly uncomfortable elements like Aureliano’s lust for Remedios Moscote, a 9-yr old girl who he gets betrothed to, after which he educates her until she hits puberty, at which point the marriage is on 😬😬😬 and I THINK that his sister murders her in order to delay Rebeca’s marriage to the Italian?????

I love the harsher, more realistic stories of Colombia in the previous books but I am just in awe and swept away by the lyrical beauty of this book, like watching a bed of flowers slowly erupt, bloom by bloom. This is everything that I had expected from Marquez, matching the insanity of the short stories in the Leaf Storm collection with the… familial epic.