AND THEN THERE WERE NONE by Agatha Christie Agatha Christie is a grand master of mystery. She specialized in the locked house mystery and "who will die next" formula. My mother was a huge mystery and horror genre fan. And Then There Were None was both . I began reading Christie's books at age eleven and reread them occasionally today. *** SPOILER ALERT*** To begin, a group of seemingly random people arrive at a remote manor home on a deserted Island for a party. “Best of an island is once you get there - you can't go any farther...you've come to the end of things...” As the bodies pile up, backstories and the reason for their attendance is revealed. Each has been found guilty of a crime decided by a judge of one and have been invited to their own execution. There was a silence—a comfortable replete silence. Into that silence came The Voice. Without warning, inhuman, penetrating . . . “Ladies and gentlemen! Silence, please! . . . Yo...

The results of the Great American Read are based on a survey in which 7,200 “demographically and statistically representative” people participated by naming their favorite novel. Number one is To Kill a Mockingbird . One of the 100 novels I read at the time of its original publication (1997), Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, made the list at #45. Especially worthy of discussion today because of the ongoing controversy about cultural appropriation, Golden wrote from a female’s point of view, a Japanese woman’s life before and during her experience as a renowned geisha in Kyoto circa World War II. The story begins: Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, “That afternoon when I met so-and-so…was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon.” Arthur Golden was born in 1956 in Tenn...