In the past few weeks, I have given serious thought to discontinuing my book blog. I am just not spending the time online like I used to and while the book count keeps climbing, my posting frequency has been abysmal. Right now I’m about 10 books and two months behind in my book commentary. Seriously, is this supposed to be stressful? I have plenty of other things to do that! So, in an effort to begin the summer with a clean slate and no lingering guilt, I’m going to do myself a favor and put together a couple summary posts of my reading backlog. And hope that I can stay somewhat on top of things going forward.

Matt’s post about train travel prompted me to read Agatha Christie’s novel Murder on the Orient Express. Well, in actuality, it prompted me to check out a copy of The 8:55 to Baghdad, a literary travelogue by Andrew Eames, from my library. But of course, I couldn’t read that book, which traces Christie’s famed train ride from London to Baghdad, without having read the book which gave Eames his inspiration. So that’s why I ended up reading Murder on the Orient Express, only my second Christie book since reading Ten Little Indians (aka And Then There Were None) back in my teens. Although I recall enjoying that book, with its myriad red herrings and Clue-like cast of characters, for whatever reason it didn’t induce me to read any more of her mysteries.

Murder on the Orient Express includes many of the same elements – eccentric and varied characters, each one a possible suspect; an unusual setting, and enough false clues to keep the reader guessing until the very end. What I didn’t remember and wasn’t expecting, was the humor. Christie’s Poirot is an astute and witty observer of human nature, and while the characters are not realistic by any means, neither are they stale cardboard cutouts. The ending rather surprised me as well, and I wondered both how that would be received in a modern mystery and whether Christie employs similar solutions in her other works. One thing I do know is that it won’t be 20 years before I read another book by the Grande Dame of Mystery. I checked and not surprisingly, Murder has been made into a movie, not just once, but twice, although the 1973 cinematic version appears to be the superior one, at least as far as collective star power and retro appeal are concerned. I’ve watched portions of it online but haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet.

I was attracted to Ann Marie Fleming’s illustrated memoir, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, when shelving in the biographies. It’s bright turquoise cover stood out among the more subdued spines surrounding it. And the title only added to the intrigue. Who is Long Tack Sam, and why is his life both magical and worthy of being documented?

Well, those are just the questions his great-granddaughter sets out to discover. Fleming, a Canadian artist and filmmaker, has only the vaguest notion of her family’s history. She’s heard stories from her grandmother involving some involvement in show businesss, but that’s about it. Her great-grandfather’s life story has been forgotten not only by society, but largely by his own family. Fleming decides to delve into this neglected past, and embarks on an odyssey that will take her across continents and into the lives of family members, magic historians and former vaudeville performers, as she tries to find out just who Long Tack Sam was and how this one man in the early 20th century made his way from rural China to the pinnacle of success, traveling the globe as a celebrity showman.

The book is a mishmash of Fleming’s sketches, photos and show business memorabilia, a fascinating and multi-layered exploration of one man’s life and the journey back in time to rediscover a family’s roots.

Although I was vaguely familiar with the fate of the infamous Donner party, mainly from the ghoulish jokes and references in popular culture, besides knowing that a group of pioneers had become trapped in the mountains out west one winter and been forced to resort to cannibalism, I was pretty much ignorant of why they were there, who they were or what their ultimate fates were. Gabrielle Burton’s novel Impatient with Desire, helped shed light on those nebulous strands of knowledge and offered a glimpse into the possible reasons for one woman to leave all that she’s known.

This slim historical novel takes the form of a collection of diary entries by Tamsen Donner, wife of the expedition’s leader, weeks into their forced encampment in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Trapped by snow, the families are running out of not only food, but hope – and in some cases, their own sanity.

But this is no melodramatic tale; if anything, it is an understated account, one that in its spare, almost eerily calm prose, only serves to heighten the feelings of despair that permeate the pages. As one of the bleakest moments in American exploration history, this is a story that needs no embellishment to capture the imagination. Still, the reader in me who loves big sumptuous historical fiction wanted more.