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Showing posts from January, 2015

No singular variety but rather a multiple range of truths

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  January is the great detective Sherlock Holmes' birthday month and he has been my childhood hero for a decade so I decided to celebrate him this year by reading and reviewing four Holmesian anthologies and this is the third for that rundown. A collection edited by Michael Kurland (who also happened to contribute his own story for this one), My Sherlock Holmes has quite an interesting unifying theme to its thirteen pieces. Where other anthologies still often make use of Dr. John Watson as its first-person narrator, this volume allows other characters from the canon to share their perspective of events regarding never-before-published cases of the great detective. Ranging from the familiar ones to the most obscure, some of the tales span for more than ten pages with two of three of them savory in length and pace. According to its general introduction, My Sherlock Holmes borrows the stylistic approach of the famous Japanese story Rashomon where each character has his or her o

The Scarlet Threads and Skeins We Unravel

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" The moment seemed to sum up my extraordinary friendship with Sherlock Holmes. Together, we had stood in many a drawing-room, many a library, and in our own rooms in Baker Street, examining evidence, discussing the significance of trifles, sifting through the debris of shattered lives, searching for truth and justice ." Continuing with my second anthology to read, relish and review for Sherlock Holmes' Birthday Month is Murder in Baker Street edited by Martin H. Greenberg., Jon L. Lettenberg and Daniel Stashower. This collection is composed of eleven compact tales of hard-boiled cases that are conventionally delivered in the typical Doyle-esque Victorian classic narrative which works to a certain extent in the seven stories that I favored the most. I was fresh from the heels of the first anthology I read ( Twenty-Two Hundred Baker Streets ) so I think comparing and contrasting these volumes has been unavoidable. It's truly an apples-and-oranges scenario, howe

...however improbable must be the truth

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January is the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes' birthday month. His creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle assigned him the 6th of January 1854 as his birthday and, growing up, I have always celebrated this date in my own special way. This year, he just turned a hundred and sixty-one years old, if you can believe it. That's a century and a half of legacy already! Because of such a tantalizing breadth of tales, Holmes and his loyal companion, best friend and bibliographer Dr. John Watson have been adapted to film and television throughout the years and these crime-solving partners were most recognizable in the present for the Guy Ritchie films starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, the BBC adaptation  Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, and, my most favorite of all, Elementary starring Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu as a female Watson. But my Sherlock Holmes will forever be Jeremy Brett of the Granada series in the late nineties because his performance simply c

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer"

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DUNE intimidates me.  I don't think I could ever recall a time that I became almost terrified to review a book and share my most intimate thoughts about reading it until now. I confess that I don't know anything about Dune until three years ago when I made the active decision to explore what the science fiction genre has to offer. I researched a lot of online lists regarding the most critically-acclaimed books and Dune was the one that keeps appearing all the time so I know that it must mean something so I ventured into buying it one afternoon in August last year when my laptop's battery charger quit on me suddenly, so I was offline for the rest of the day. And my world in that moment has never been the same since I started reading it. Everything about doing so was unplanned and it couldn't have been more perfect. Just seventy-four pages in and I knew I was reading something special already. The magnificence of the novel is often subtle yet clear-cut in a