The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne- I.39- On solitude.-OK, this is one of the longer, denser, and one of the better known essays by Montaigne...that I will get to next week.
The Complete Sherlock Holmes Vol. 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle- A Case of Identity- A young woman’s fiancée disappears on their wedding day...in fact, he disappears on the way to the church, and the woman hires Sherlock Holmes to find him.
What’s so impressive about this story is that there is no crime committed; in fact, Holmes, himself, borders on being the criminal in the most technical of senses… and not for the first or last time. In this story and in later stories, Holmes is driven, most importantly, of course, by the puzzle itself but also by a sense of justice and fairness, regardless of whether the perpetrator or ‘’the villain’’ actually breaks any laws.
If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working theough generation, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and forseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
I am reading:
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D.G. Kelley
Bedlam: London and its Mad by Catherine Arnold- Was in a used book store the other day and there was simply no way that I was going to pass up this historical account of probably the best known psychiatric hospital in the world, especially since it only cost a dollar plus tax.
20 pages in, this is not as scholarly as I expected, although Arnold certainly did the research to write a more scholarly account. A light read that I expect to read relatively quickly...all the while combing through the footnotes lookig for more to read on the subject at a later date.
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Just a brief note for those who have purchased and are reading Hillary Clinton’s newly published account of the 2016 presidential election, What Happened?, El Mito is doing a book club for What Happened? on Monday afternoons around 5:45 pm or so.