Reademption Literature

I started my Book Diet novels 2015 by reading four Sherlockian anthologies during January, which is also the said Great Detective's birthday month, so I thought it only appropriate to finish this year with a Sherlock Holmes novel once more, and this time it's something written by writer Larry Millet. It's the first time I encountered his Holmes series. In fact, I purchased this book by luck while sifting through boxes of a second-hand bookstore months and months ago. I'm always on the look-out for any Holmesian story I can get my hands on so I immediately bought this and knew I had to read it soon enough. And it wasn't a disappointment. Millet's series, from what I can tell, are focused on Sherlock Holmes' travels and subsequent cases in America, and The Rune Stone Mystery  is no exception.  Once again chronicled in the first person by his constant and faithful friend Dr. John Watson, this story takes readers into Minnesota where a farmer uncovered w...

"For all men are eggs, in a manner of speaking. We exist, but we have not yet achieved the form that is our destiny. We are pure potential, an example of the not-yet arrived. For man is a fallen creature--we know that from Genesis. Humpty Dumpty is also one. He falls from his wall, and no one can put him back together again--neither king, nor his horses, nor his men. But that is what we must all strive to do. It is our duty as human beings: to put the eggs back together again. For each of us is Humpty Dumpty. And to help him is to help ourselves." I became intimately familiar with Paul Auster for the first time when I read his novella Travels in the Scriptorium  back when I was eighteen and I had wasted the first two years of college skipping classes I don't like and opting to stay inside my dorm room instead just to read books and watch shows. Auster's book was one of these distractions I easily warmed up to, particularly when I found his narrative style to ...

  "There must be a never-ending supply of Holmes stories just as there must be air and water. And they must be the finest Holmes stories we can create. Not the true quill of the Master perhaps, but still nourishing to a parched and hungry soul." This is the final anthology I'm reviewing for the Sherlock Holmes birthday month last January which managed to bleed into this month as well because I was preoccupied with other readings so I had to take breaks for the last two books in my SH roster. But I eventually did finish reading all of them and now I'm officially ending with yet another collection edited by Michael Kurland, Sherlock Holmes: The American Years. It's worth mentioning that this is a re-read from six years ago which meant that the material is once again fresh in my eyes and I can honestly say that I barely remember a lot of these stories at all. Only one really struck me as a standout. The ten stories included in this volume have operated with ...

  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 ...

" 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...

  Growing up with books, I used to read my father's collection of medical and legal thrillers when I was ten, and then he bought me the Harry Potter series, and I realized that I could fall in love with books after all. Though J.K Rowling may be the author that introduced me to that possibility, it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's timeless creation Sherlock Holmes who won my heart when I was twelve and his grip hasn't let up since. The Sherlock Holmes stories were the source of modern crime-solving adaptations that we now experience in television, and Doyle's tales of mystery and adventure were often audacious, insightful and clever. The real draw of his stories is the process of crime detection ("deductive reasoning") that Doyle allows the readers to understand, experience and apply themselves alongside Watson as Holmes investigates the cases. The Complete Sherlock Holmes volumes 1 and 2 by Bantam publishing co. had never changed its price from the fir...