Just wanted to mention that although I’ve already started reading a couple of interesting old mystery novels, and making notes on them preparatory to reviewing them, because I’ve announced my participation in 2014 Vintage Mystery Bingo (see below) any post for the remainder of the year will be about films. I certainly have a backlog of those to review also! I’m working on something and I might have enough time over the week between Christmas and New Year’s to get another review done also.
Just on the morning when I was thinking, “Oh, I really don’t post enough, I need to have some way of focusing my attention on books and getting down to reading them and writing about them,” what crossed my path? A Bingo card.
I got this from a blog post here, whose author has a great deal of enthusiasm about “mystery fiction” and seemingly for enrolling herself and others into various “challenges” and then fulfilling their requirements by reading and/or reviewing various books. I had encountered these challenges before but never really considered participating; it all seemed a bit forced to me. But I thought perhaps it will do me some good to focus my attention in arbitrary ways. I haven’t been finding too many bad books for my “100 Mysteries you should die before you read” series, although I still am enthusiastic about its basic concept. And I seem to have been writing about quite a few mystery films lately, partly because I’m unwilling to manoeuvre through my spare room’s towering stacks of boxes of books in order to find a novel that piques my interest. I need a kick in the literary ass, in other words.
So, in 2014, I shall see how far I get with “Vintage Mystery Bingo”. “My Reader’s Block”, from whence this comes, asks us to observe a difference between Golden and Silver Age vintage mysteries (and yes, she’s right, I’m one of the people who disagrees with the details of the dating of those periods). I will respectfully decline; I’m going to find the boundaries of this sufficiently confining as it is. I’ll just review mysteries that interest me and fit the categories somehow, and if that “breaks the rules” then so be it. I very, very rarely will pick up a book written after 1989 so I should have no trouble staying within the Gold/Silver categories.
I see there are a couple of categories here that will challenge me to extend myself a bit and, lazy old slug that I am, that’s probably a good thing too. I’ll be hard-pressed to find an author whose work I have never, ever read, but — never say never. I’ve never tried anything like this; thanks to Bev Hankins, of My Reader’s Block, for this interesting idea.
Noah's Archives 