The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton

I am struggling to fight the drowsiness during finishing this book. And lost the battles numerous times.

Most-often-shown expression during reading this book

This has nothing to do with the insane heat and humidity. This has to do with the intrinsic boredom of this book! This is a collection of short cases, thankfully - it will certainly be a more hellish reading experience were it a novel relating a lengthy story, Christie-style, because nothing short than a delicious promise of bribe can keep my eyes wide open during reading this! 

The detective in question is a Roman Catholic priest named Father Brown, and he has a sidekick - a French called Flambeau. Brown is a nondescript, dull-looking character; while Flambeau is an ex-Robin Hood-esque thief. These characterization have so much potential to be interesting and great, but... I don't know. Something in Chesterton's narrative is so heavily laden with laudanum that drugs its reader to blessed unconsciousness every pages or so. Goodness gracious.

And to make it worse, it is annotated. The annotation is only useful to most devoted fans of Chesterton. For the casual reader of detective stories, they are just annoyances.

Dean is annoyed. ディアも。Annoyed.

Sometimes the languages are too... flowery. I don't know, but those combinations of words just don't work for me. 

The annotator is CLEARLY a Chesterton sympathist. Well, duh, else, why on earth would he annotate the stories with those such boring facts? He had the gall of admitting that Chesterton's stories are sometimes 'improbable' and said that it's not a bad thing and to make his case he dared using Chandler as an example. One of the reason he said Chandler is not being realistic is that 'I recalled an interview with professional LA police official who said he never heard a private detective called a shamus, in California or anywhere else'.

Isn't one source too narrow a sample? Bosh.

Four stars for making me spend some hours in my life reading the most boring book in existence. I am thankful I made a correct choice, reading The Innocence of Father Brown first before a Peter Wimsey book I found in my uni library.

Wimseeeeeeeey! squeeee!

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