Well, not to get too Poirot about it all, I feel like her reported "nervous and jumpy" demeanor more closely suits a murderer than an intended suicide.  But perhaps she was a perfectionist.

I imagine #4 as becoming a long-running BBC comedy favorite entitled Dad's Abbey.

Oh and Sonia, the walking in a circle thing was the prisoners' (only, probably) exercise.  There's a famous Van Gogh painting depicting this, with Van Gogh painting himself as a prisoner as a cameo.

Well, obviously Mrs. Bates was trying to kill Bates.  That became clear the moment Mrs. Bartlett described her scrubbing at her hands after making pastry.

Why did you name your daughter after a car?

My wife calls it Frenchoslovakian, I say Serbo-Welsh.

Have we cleared up the Canadian issue yet?  Because it's a market waiting to happen.

For me the line of the night was: "Could it be drink?"

Not bad at all.  I had been forming an idea that the Dowager Countess was an elderly Van Helsing type, still quick with a stake.  Meanwhile Thomas and Matthew were both draculas, Matthew being a good dracula.  But I guess the Countess could be a dracula too.

I thought it was kind of creepy how much alike they looked.  It made me wonder why they bothered killing William.

I take a bit of issue with the reviewer's comment about the servants spouting "the oddest, unironic statements about tradition and culture despite being on some of the lowest levels of the social totem pole."  The reality of the situation seems to be that the servants in houses of this sort were just as invested in…

It's not a question of dumbness.  I'm reckoned pretty smart and I had to make a couple goes at it, and so did other pretty-smart-reckoned people I know. He's got a distinct and difficult style and it's less a matter of understanding all the technical details and information than it is working with those multilayered…

The British: Well, we didn't expect the rocketry program at Peenemunde.

Just like in life.

On the subject of quality standards, the Perdue family declined comment.

@DesertDweller79:disqus : You're about .5 volumes up on me.  It is a rich and heady brew that seems best (and unavoidably) sipped slowly.

The diary entries at the beginning had me feeling a little hesitant, but now that I'm into the second section I'm think I'm getting what Bolano is going for and I'm liking it.

That's pretty much my situation with Remembrance of Things Past.

Just finished Wallace's The Pale King, and on a whim I picked up Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives to be the next.  It's been sitting on my shelf for a few months now and I feel like I've seen a lot of talk about it both on this site and elsewhere.

I just finished The Pale King.  The writing was gorgeous in places.  The notes he sketched out made me feel that had he completed it, and achieved what he planned, this would have been a really great and even genuinely uplifting novel.