Get the kindle app on your phone. That way you can read whilst looking like you're scrolling...

She is. The character is to make fun of herself, and address things people have said about her.

And in Partners in Crime, Christie has Tommy and Tuppence reference/imitate different fictional detectives, including Poirot.

A lot of Poirot are essentially puzzles, with the same pieces in different arrangements. The characters are all largely stock character 'types', but they're always enjoyable and it allows for misdirection because we expect certain types to behave in certain ways.

Christie is also surprisingly funny. The Poirot novels that include Ariadne Oliver are good fun.

I don't know the measurements but I have quite a small copy of Cat's Cradle.

I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in around 2005 and I've read the whole series every couple of years since.

There are quite a lot of books I've read multiple times, and a few that I intend to read again and again in future.

The only limit I have is waiting at least one year before I read the same book again.

The outcry of the hardline Christian groups, particularly in the US, also really helped. It was the best free marketing anyone could hope for, because it was in the news constantly and of course you're going to be interested in reading a book that's causing protests and getting banned...

I have no recollection of reading them but remember being crazy about the books in the late '90s and early 2000s when they first came out. When each one came out I'd read them pretty much in one sitting.

They felt big and grown up because they were so big, but the story was pretty basic and easy to read. It created an exciting fantasy. They're not particularly brilliant as pieces of writing, but there wasn't really anything else at the time and it was a very rare instance of a book becoming a huge cultural phenomenon.

I stopped reading them after 4-5 books when there was a long gap between books and I grew out of them.

The enduring popularity is similar to Star Wars. The original Star Wars films are objectively terrible on almost every level, but it was unlike anything else when it came out. Young people at the time loved them, grew up with them, and then introduced it to their kids and so on. All thr while new Star Wars stuff would come out. I got into Star Wars when the original trilogy got re-released ahead of the prequels coming out. Now I'll still watch Star Wars stuff out of nostalgia more than anything.

Harry Potter is the same, but they're also films. And there have been spin-offs and additional media. Parents introduce kids to the books, kids too young for the books would be the right age when the films came out, etc etc.

Quality is very rarely the cause of a cultural phenomenon. It's a case of timing, capturing imagination, and marketing.

JK Rowling didn't write a great book, she created a fantasy world with very wide appeal.

Not really. I started reading a lot when I was about eight or nine and had absolutely nothing in the way of career goals.

If anything, having a job interferes with my reading goals.