Book buying under the influence

[sawyl]

Elif Batuman describes how, having bought a Kindle, she now buys far more books drunk than sober. What sort of things does she buy? Mainly Agatha Christie mysteries:

Because I am a writer, people sometimes ask me how ebooks have changed the literary landscape. The short answer, for me, is that I have developed a compulsion to drunk-dial Agatha Christie several times a week. The Poirot mysteries, which initially seemed to me to rush by too fast and leave nothing behind, are, I find, perfect for a drunk reader with a decreased attention span. The undazzling writing style now seems to me to correspond, profoundly and even ingeniously, to the plot: despite an unassuming, even banal or ridiculous appearance, the detectives work in unfathomably deep ways.

Perhaps this explains why Lucy Mangan has problems with Christie: she hasn't been reading them in the correct, chemically altered frame of mind.