#23// cosy mystery + best chocolate chip cookies

hello new year

Dear Reader,
Hello, dear friends. It is a brand-new year. Let’s keep it realistic and hope it will be a good one and nothing as bad as 2020. Fingers crossed. Did you have a good time over the holidays? I read some, cooked a lot, tidied up a fair bit and got stressed with the updates of the Covid villain. I cannot wait to go into a world where end-of-the year season is more exciting! Onto the good bits,
 

Read

December was perfect for a cosy mystery and I snuggled with an e-ARC of The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji, translated from Japanese by Ho-Ling Wong, from Pushkin Press. It is written in the style of And then there were none by Agatha Christie (which is one of my all-time favourite books AND my favourite Christie mystery. So read it please if you haven’t). PS: Christie's novel is referenced in this Japanese mystery.

In The Decagon House Murders, we have a ten-edged house in an isolated island. Seven university students who are part of a mystery group decide to spend a few days at this house. They go by nicknames based on famous mystery writers—Ellery, Agatha, Van, Leroux, Orczy, Carr and Poe. Things look lovely, until they start going wrong. Poisons start popping up. Coffee mugs get strange. Students get murdered. There are chopped-off hands (that eerily imitates the murders that took place in the house many years ago), and lots of blood. As is usual with golden mysteries, we speed through the plot. No emotions, no dilly-dallying. So it goes like “Oh, our friend is dead” to “Here’s what happens next” pretty quickly.
 
With three murder mysteries packed into the book, there’s a lot to bite on. One being the present—the students getting murdered. There’s an old unsolved locked-island murder mystery (and chopped hands) associated with the house which is getting reinvestigated by a former member of the mystery Kawaminami because of a mysterious letter. Also there is a fellow student Chiori who died while at the uni, but she also happens to be the daughter of the previous owner of the Decagon house.
 
Something that kind of felt like a fish bone stuck in throat was when at the end of the novel, when the mystery is being solved, the students are addressed by their real names. I wish the author had introduced the real names sooner because my mind just couldn’t map the nicknames and the real names fast enough. It was an enjoyable read either way, and I think you would love it if you like these kinds of mysteries.
 

Book Club news

Misleading title. More of a read along than a regular book club. But now that I’ve got your attention, we will be doing a readalong of Moustache by S. Hareesh, translated from Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil, from tomorrow. The novel had a controversial and bumpy start when it was serialized as Meesha in Mathrubhumi and right wing supporters forced it to a stop. Meesha was later published as a novel, and its English translation Moustache won the JCB prize for literature last year.
 

  The story follows a lower caste man who sports a moustache, against the societal norms, which irks the upper caste men. Woven with Vavachan’s story is an ambitious, sprawling narrative of environmental degradation, myth-making, harvest songs, patriarchy, caste hierarchies and history.
 

Join us at thesatchelbookclub (all deets here) where discussion questions will be posted every Friday over five weeks. There’s also an email list if that's your jam. (Simply reply with ‘subscribe to Moustache read along’ and you’ll be added). It is a heavy read, but also a worthwhile one. If you have the time to spare, do join in. And use the hashtag #readwithresh so that I can find you.

Bake

It doesn’t get better than perfect chocolate chip cookies and I have baked them for the first time, and FELL IN LOVE. My sister baked a killer batch during the lockdown last year, with some tweaks, making it all the more chocolatey and more lovely. I didn’t tweak anything because it was my first time. Just added some salt flakes for that extra edge after the cookies were baked. The recipe is all sorts perfect. I scooped the dough into balls and froze them. So there has been freshly baked cookies with evening coffee which sounds (And tastes) divine and also smells like heaven, every day. 

Amazing Links

- I would read anything Ann Patchett writes (that’s a lie because I haven’t explored her fiction in depth yet. Any recommendations? Her essays are so perfect). And this is excellent—Those Precious Days (Harper’s Bazaar)
 
- Really enjoyed making my way through 52 things I learnt in 2020 (Tom Whitwell, Fluxx Studio | Medium). Check it out and follow the links that intrigue you. I fell into the internet blackhole with this one.

 - Why did Christie Smythe upend her life and stability for Martin Shkreli, one of the least-liked men in the world? (Stephanie Clifford, Elle)
The pharma bro and the journalist (styled in a dress called Vampire’s wife!) was the eye rolling read of 2020 and it is worth the hype. It is a bizarre read about being infatuated with a master manipulator who is now in jail, freezing eggs, twitter debates .. well, read it.
 
- Beautiful nature writing about watching a pink trumpet tree bloom in 2020 bringing a semblance of comfort (Priyanka Sacheti, First Post)

 - A suitable re-read: What I learned from Vikram Seth’s great novel, second time round (Mahesh Rao, Prospect magazine)

 

That’s a wrap. See you soon,
Resh x


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