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"He was very willing to have a holiday" [REDH]


As we start to wind down the year and get ready for the holiday, I for one am looking forward to a week off and some time to catch up on some reading. I have this habit, which drives my wife crazy, of reading more than one book at a time. I do this partly because I always have one physical book and one digital and partly because there are just too many books to read and I'm like a kid in a candy store.

Digitally I'm currently reading The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which is a great collection of stories by some very well known authors like Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, BSI ("The Devil's Foot"), and others. The premise of these stories being much more fantastical and well..."improbable."

My physical pastiche is The Stuff of Nightmares by James Lovegrove, which was published by Titan Books along with The Will of the Dead, which you can read my review here.

This summer my family and I stopped by this wonderful little used bookstore in Seattle and I bought
The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, which was co-written by Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Sir Arthur, and mystery writer John Dickson Carr. I've heard mixed reviews but I'm interested to see how the Son of Doyle fills his father's shoes (although you have to wonder how much he actually wrote and how much Carr was the driving force).

At that same used bookstore I picked up Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street by William S. Baring-Gould, BSI ("The Gloria Scott"). I've heard really good things about this one but haven't read it yet myself. While it's not a pastiche in the traditional sense, it's a biography of Sherlock Holmes written as if he were a real person, with details of his life and character extracted from the pages of his stories.

That alone will more than keep me busy for the holiday week but I still have a stack of pastiches to read after these (I have another terrible habit of buying way more books than I can read). So to give you a peak at what I'll be reviewing next year here's what else is currently sitting unread on my bookshelf.

As soon as I heard that it had been picked up to be made into a movie staring Ian McKellen as a past-his-prime Holmes, I managed to pick up a used but near perfect first edition of A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin.

I had bought The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz new before I moved back from London and still haven't cracked the cover. This being the most recent "blessed" works by the Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd. and a best seller, I'm looking forward to reading it.

Now that my kids know I'm reviewing Sherlock Holmes books they want me to review the young adult series, The Young Sherlock Holmes by Andrew Lane. My teenage daughter really enjoyed them so at some point I may start with the first book, Death Cloud.

I'd love to hear what you'll be reading this holiday break. Do you have any pastiche recommendations that you'd like to see me review next year? Let me know in the comments.

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