It's a Sherlock Holmes kind of day

I've never been to London, but I imagine that today's mood matches the famed city's typical ambiance: grey, with shoulder-shrugging acceptance that it might probably rain, it's just one of those days.  It's the kind of day that makes me want to curl up in my chair with a cuppa tea in one hand(Earl Grey, probably, or some other British breakfast tea) and The Complete Sherlock Holmes, volume II in the other.  I feel like most of the his stories take place on such a day.  Even if I essentially take myself from one dreary setting to another, at least I'm escaping from my own machinations to that of the brilliant bipolar detective and his biographer.

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On Sherlock Holmes' breadth of knowledge

Sherlock Holmes' approach to collecting information is to only seek and store that which will be useful to him in the future.  In the second chapter of the first book in which this illustrious detective is introduced (A Study in Scarlet), his biographer and friend Dr. John Watson makes an inventory of Holmes' knowledge.  The list, reproduced below: (taken from Page By Page Books)

1. Knowledge of Literature. -- Nil.
2.              Philosophy. -- Nil.
3.              Astronomy. -- Nil.
4.              Politics. -- Feeble.
5.              Botany. -- Variable.  Well up in belladonna,
                            opium, and poisons generally.
                            Knows nothing of practical gardening.
6.              Geology. -- Practical, but limited.
                             Tells at a glance different soils
                             from each other.  After walks has
                             shown me splashes upon his trousers,
                             and told me by their colour and
                             consistence in what part of London
                             he had received them.
7.              Chemistry. -- Profound.
8.              Anatomy. -- Accurate, but unsystematic.
9.              Sensational Literature. -- Immense.  He appears
                            to know every detail of every horror
                            perpetrated in the century.
10. Plays the violin well.
11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.
12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

Comfort book: "Shadow of the Hegemon"

Two days ago when I was at the library I saw this book and picked it up to check out. I hadn't planned on taking it out but it just happened to be there and I just happen to be waiting for my next leisure-reading book to come in.

This book is the literary equivalent of comfort food to me. I've read better books-- read all the books in this "Ender's Shadow" series, in fact-- but this is one of those books I can't not pick up when I go past the paperback fiction shelf and it's just there, waiting to be read. I usually read it in a day, not because I have the time to sit down and read a book cover-to-cover but because it takes a lot of effort to tear myself away from it once I've started. It's a real page-turning thriller, and even though I know what will happen to all these characters that I know and care for I still get caught up in the same emotions I had when I first read the book.


Right now the book is in one of my desk drawers rather someplace I can see it. This is to prevent me from reading the book before the weekend. Maybe I'll do an actual book review then, when all the details are fresh, rather than now and during the weekday when other responsibilities take precedence. After all, the protagonist is one of the namesakes of my violin.

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