This week's adoration:
I had my first encounter with Sherlock Holmes two weeks ago actually and he solved the mystery of what I have been missing all my life. Two longer novellas and a few short stories later, Arthur Conan Doyle leap-frogged over a bunch of people to a top position in my favorite authors list. If I'm not giggling over the other characters reactions from meeting Holmes for the first time, or sighing over the eloquently written dialogue, I'm fawning over his explanations of how he solved the mystery by deducting the facts from cigar ashes and footprints in the mud. He's astoundingly brilliant and the way Doyle writes him I feel as if he is a real person and often times wish that he was.
Going in, I was concerned that the writing may be a bit too elaborate to follow. I've read a few mystery novels where I surf through the sea of scientific facts and minute details before coming out on the other end, still wondering how the heck this whole mystery pieced together. With Holmes though, I find myself baffled by how he draws his conclusions, but the explanations are so perfectly clear I wonder how I didn't solve the case earlier.
So if you are looking for a good book to keep you entertained for far beyond just a week, I would highly suggest Holmes. Not only because it's excellent literature, but because you can pick up Bantum Classic's first volume of Doyle's entire collection (complete with 36 stories and his first two Novellas--A Study in Scarlet and Sign of Four) for just $7 at your local bookstore. It'll probably look a little like this:
Happy Reading!
-- BB
