One down, 9 to go
Dec. 19th, 2009 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
litlover12I've finished Too Many Cooks. It looks as if being snowed in is going to help immeasurably in the speedy completion of Operation Book Binge!
This particular entry in the Nero Wolfe series was well up to the mark. I did not guess the murderer correctly: It came down to two suspects, and after a little wavering, I picked the wrong one. So kudos to Mr. Stout for so cleverly deceiving me. For that, and for finding a creative and plausible way of getting the famously sedentary detective out of his New York brownstone and all the way down to West Virginia -- and furthermore, for putting him in some highly unique and interesting situations once he gets there -- I'll give this one 4.5 out of 5 stars. When it looked like everything was pointing straightforwardly toward one person, I was planning to give it four stars, but the successful deception earns it another half star.
At the end of the book is a fragment from a Nero Wolfe book written posthumously by another author, which is so bad that I was tempted to take away that half star again. But after all, that's not Mr. Stout's fault. So I just pretended it wasn't really part of the book at all, and let things be.
Next up: Curiosities of Literature by John Sutherland.
This particular entry in the Nero Wolfe series was well up to the mark. I did not guess the murderer correctly: It came down to two suspects, and after a little wavering, I picked the wrong one. So kudos to Mr. Stout for so cleverly deceiving me. For that, and for finding a creative and plausible way of getting the famously sedentary detective out of his New York brownstone and all the way down to West Virginia -- and furthermore, for putting him in some highly unique and interesting situations once he gets there -- I'll give this one 4.5 out of 5 stars. When it looked like everything was pointing straightforwardly toward one person, I was planning to give it four stars, but the successful deception earns it another half star.
At the end of the book is a fragment from a Nero Wolfe book written posthumously by another author, which is so bad that I was tempted to take away that half star again. But after all, that's not Mr. Stout's fault. So I just pretended it wasn't really part of the book at all, and let things be.
Next up: Curiosities of Literature by John Sutherland.
