Finally another Sunday Salon

It’s been a while, but this weekend I finally have time to read more than five pages. That’s been a while. I am cleaning up my reading-related to-do-list so I can start 2008 with a new book and no backlog of reviews to write.

In the morning, with coffee and breakfast in bed, I finished the first volume of Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I had been reading this on and off for the last four months or so, reading it mostly alongside non-fiction books and as bedtime reading. Reading all 900+ pages at once would be a major overkill of Sherlock Holmes, but this way it was fine. However, it will definitely be some time before I will tackle the second volume.

In many of the stories the way things happened are actually rather easy to figure out for the reader, the “surprise element” is usually in the motive or in the details. Generally, the most interesting characters in the stories are not Holmes or Watson. They actually are kind of bland, we don’t get to know too much about them, actually even less as the series progress. Insofar as they are actually interesting, the most interesting people in the stories are those that are connected to the mysteries that Holmes is asked to solve.

Reading the stories more or less in chronological order of publishing reveals some interesting inconsistencies or “holes” in the stories. Firstly, already in the beginning there is the wound that Dr. Watson apparently received while serving in the British army in Afghanistan. On the very first page of the very first story A Study in Scarlet Dr. Watson tells us he “was struck on the shoulder by a [...] bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery.” In the following story The Sign of Four, however, Watson sits “nursing [his] wounded leg. [He] had had a [...] bullet through it some time before.”
Then there is Watson’s marriage to Mary Morstan after The Sign of Four takes place. Watson then moves out of the apartment he share with Sherlock Holmes on 221B Baker Street and takes up his medical profession again. Eventually, many stories later, Holmes famously disappears near the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Due to popular demand at the time, Doyle made Holmes reappear and continue his detective work with Watson at his side. The first stories were published in the early 1890s, Homes reappeared about ten years later and another set of short and longer stories (including The Hound of the Baskervilles) were published.

After his reappearance Watson moves back in with Holmes in their apartment on Baker Street, but there is not one single reference to Watson wife or his marriage. It is not Holmes who mysteriously disappears, but Watson’s wife Mary. The same actually goes for Holmes’ brother Mycroft, who appears in some of the later stories before Homes’ disappearance. Later on, he is not even referred to. Something else that disappears after Holmes’ re-emergence is his addiction to cocaine, though his previous drug use is referred to a couple of times in later stories. I assume Watson’s wound and his wife and Mycroft were in the way of Doyle when writing his stories and he may have dropped Holmes’ cocaine addiction because society and ideas had changed. This is just my guess, though, I am not at all sure about this. The addiction may just as well also have gotten in the way of the author.

After finishing Sherlock Holmes, I got up, did some chores in the house and then sat down again to read. This time I read Armenia: Poverty, Transition & Democracy by Onnik Krikorian. He is a friend of mine who works as a freelance photographer and journalist here in Armenia. His blog is in my opinion the best English language blog on Armenia and one of the best sources of news on Armenia (and no, I am not saying that because I happen to know the guy). He runs another blog here covering the run-up to the presidential elections in Armenia on February 19 next year. Onnik’s book consists of several articles on Armenia accompanied by his pictures. His website and blogs are well worth a look and a read.

I’ve also read a couple of chapters in Madeleine Albright’s book The Mighty and the Almighty (review to follow once I’ve finished it). I want to finish this book and write a review before the end of the year. There is one other book I read this year, for which I started writing a review but which I never got around to finishing. That I also want to finish before the year ends. Neither should be too difficult a task. Any other reading and writing I will do is optional and undecided yet. I do know that I want to start the new year with a book for the Russian Reading Challenge. I am still undecided which one it’ll be, either Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figes or Gulag by Anne Applebaum. Currently I am tending towards the latter, but I have already switched a couple of times depending on my mood, so eventually it’ll be a surprise for you and me which one I’ll pick up on January 1st.