January 17, 2024

During the winter of 2021, when the COVID pandemic was at its height, I started reading through A. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. I'd had an edition that reproduced the stories as they appeared in the British periodical The Strand, with illustrations, for many years, but hadn't opened it before then. I returned to the book the following winter, and read the second volume of stories. It then sat in my bookcase until early this month after I returned from a difficult few weeks in Maine helping my mom move out of her house. The memories of those weeks c/w the looming malevolent chaos of the incoming Trump regime made the prospect of losing myself in the relatively orderly late Victorian/early Edwardian world of Holmes appealing again. So I've picked up where I left off and am zipping through The Hound of the Baskervilles, which I'm finding a very amiable companion for these winter nights and occasional mornings with coffee.