Words on Wednesday: Recent Reading

Detective Fiction and Biblical Novels, with Some Surprises!

 

• The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, by WS Baring-Gould: Back when we were single, MyGuy bought two sets of this: one for himself, and one for my Christmas gift.  The annotations sometimes get too much (most of them seem to be Sherlockian arguments about dating the stories!), but overall these add to enjoyment.
• Lynn Austin's Restoration Chronicles: i own and enjoy her Chronicles of the King series, though i wish her reissued ones follow the original series more closely - that could be a whole 'nother post! Her other historical series are popular, though i haven't read them.  But the recent read is The Restoration Chronicles, about Israel's three waves of returnees after the captivity.  Each book is told through an omniscient narrator, focusing on individuals of the time, often the very ones whose names we find in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The people are believable as they work through issues that seem very relevant to our own time.

•  The Fairest of Them All: i love fairy tale pastiches!  This one tells a new version of the story of Snow White's step mother.

Clockwise from top: Fairest of Them All, a volume from a bargain set of Holmes/Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes in America, Dodie Smith's One Hundred and One Dalmations, The Fine Art of Murder

• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in a portable edition
• Sherlock Holmes in America a set of pastiches, many of which seem to me indistinguishable from Doyle's "canon." There is at least one telling of a tale whose intriguing title was mentioned in a Doyle story; we see Holmes tramping the country as an actor; another, solving a mystery at the 1903 World's Fair; and a novelette bridging The Valley of Fear and His Last Bow. My edition is apparently the original publication of ten years ago.  There's also a just released this summer paperback and ebook.
• The Hundred and One Dalmatians, by Dodie Smith:  Walt's source for his movie, a fascinating story on its own.  i like to think of it as an illustration of why books and movies shouldn't necessarily be identical.
• The Fine Art of Murder: History, art, Indiana locales.  Love it.  Twenty "page turning short stories,"interleaved with "fact sheets" about a Hoosier artist.  Disclaimer: i only read 19 of the stories.  The last one looked like it was taking a direction i didn't like, and, when i looked at the last pages, this was confirmed. Someone else may like it, but not me.  The other 19, though, i wouldn't have missed for anything.