Amelia Peabody Novels, by Elizabeth Peters


Semi-parodic semi-serious turn-of-the-century Egyptologist romantic mystery adventure series. (Either you want to read that or you don't, and either way you're right).

I only really have one thing to say about these, which is that I find schlocky mystery novels as addictive as Twitter or whatever, I truly struggled to get work done while reading these because I just wanted to finish them and find out what the ending was. I'm reminded as always about one of my favourite pieces of writing ever:

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/a-simple-way-to-create-suspense/

which is basically about how our brains respond to mysteries and open loops by just being desperate to find out the answers. I think about that so much, I think it's the key to a lot of behaviour, but I haven't quite figured out what to do with it yet.

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