Wednesday Book Recommendation

How are you coming with your reading plan for 2010? I'm done with my January reading "assignment", The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, and I really enjoyed it. It wasn't at all what I thought it would be, but that makes it all the more fun to read! If you're interested in picking up a copy to read for yourself, you can click on the link below and I'll earn some money back from your purchase (the whole disclosure thing is apparently important now {thank you FTC} - you can read my full disclosure policy on the right side of the page).

I'm planning on reviewing it for the last Wednesday Book Recommendation of the month. It's a short book and an easy read. But all of that isn't important because it's not today's book recommendation! :-) In fact, today's selection is not one, but two books.

(Drumroll...)

My two well-worn, well-read copies

Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories Volume I and II by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - classics!! I've just finished reading through these books for the - oh my - perhaps the fifth time? I never get tired of the adventures of the detective and his faithful friend Dr. Watson. Most of the tales of Sherlock Holmes were written as a series of short stories for The Strand Magazine and ran for thirty-nine years until Conan Doyle ended the series in 1930. That's quite a career for a medical man turned author!

The character of Sherlock Holmes was so influential that he is mentioned in several of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries. In various novels, the character Poirot talks of reading Conan Doyle's stories and of sitting at home, letting "the little grey cells" work from an armchair rather than running here and there like Holmes. And it's almost impossible to not notice that Poirot's devoted friend Captain Hastings plays a similar role to that of the faithful Dr. Watson.

From the back cover

Since his first appearance in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes has been one of the most beloved fictional characters ever created. Now, in two volumes, this new Bantam edition presents all 56 short stories and 4 novels featuring Conan Doyle's classic hero - a truly complete collection of Sherlock Holmes's adventures in crime now available in paperback!

[...]

Conan Doyle's incomparable tales bring to life a Victorian England of horse-drawn cabs, fogs, and the famous lodgings at 221B Baker Street, where for more than forty years Sherlock Holmes earned his undisputed reputation as the greatest fictional detective of all time.

I've always enjoyed a good mystery - not something with loads of blood and gore - and these are certainly well-written stories in an era of history that I love. If you are interested in purchasing these paperback volumes, you can do so through my Amazon links below:

    

And if you'd like to see what version is on my Christmas list for 2010...

I actually found this version at our local used book store (Mr. K's), but as they wouldn't allow you to use trade credit to buy it, I skipped it and am holding out for the Amazon price to fall. I mean, I do have 11.5 months for the price to go down! :-)

And just for the record...I will not be going to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. :-P I think the words of one reviewer (David Stratton in The Australian) sum up the reasons why you won't find me in the movie theater, "...Ritchie's film is a travesty of Conan Doyle and a reprehensible rip-off of one of fiction's great characters." Now, why would I want to see that happen to one of my favorite characters and the books I have enjoyed for years? You can read Stratton's full review here.

In my humble, uninformed (I haven't seen the movie), and biased opinion (for the sake of full disclosure), skip the theater version and read the books instead. :-)