Name:
Location: Seattle, Washington, United States

What you have here is an old guy. In education for 30 years, started teaching elementary, ended as library and media director of community college. I've enjoyed mountain climbing, sports car rallying, was pipe major of a bagpipe band, played guitar and sang during the folk revival, walking and hiking later in life. Now fairly sedentary. Enjoy reading, esp. mysteries and fantasy, but my reading is pretty eclectic. Enjoy movies, giving Netflix a workout.

Friday, March 18, 2005

More Sherlock Holmes

It's been a Sherlock Holmes kind of time around here. I think I spoke recently of acquiring the recent edition of the Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which contains the fifty short stories in two volumes with annotations and illustrations. A wonderful book. Then recently a friend gave me the first half of a set CDs containing the dramatizations of the complete canon. Clive Merrison is Sherlock Holmes and Michael Williams is Dr. Watson. Wonderful radio acting, faithful to the Doyle stories and especially good sound effects. I am led to believe that, if I am a good boy, I will receive the second half in due time. Meanwhile I have slowly been acquiring the DVDs of the Holmes dramatizations featuring Jeremy Brett that were produced by Britain's Granada TV and shown here on PBS. I have most of them on videotape but I prefer to have all of them on DVD.

Finally I stumbled upon what I hope will be a marvelous book while wandering through the University Book Store, one of Seattle's two largest bookstores. It's entitled The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes; the Adventures of the Great Detective in India and Tibet. It was written by Jamyang Norbu, a Tibetan writer. People who are familiar with the Holmes story will remember that Sherlock, after his presumed death in his fight with Moriarity at Reichenbach Falls, wandered in the east. He told Watson upon his return that he had been to Tibet and spoken with the "Great Lama," by which we presume him to mean the Dalai Lama. He used the assumed name of Sigerson. What excites me even more is that he wanders through northern India and on into Tibet in the company of Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, the famous Bengali spy known as Hurree Babu, a character in Rudyard Kipling's book, Kim. Kim is one of my top five favorite books of all time and I am really looking forward to reading this. I have several other books to finish first. I think that the wait is good discipline for me. But my mind is itching to set the others aside and to dive right into this.

3 Comments:

Blogger adamosf said...

Kim is one of the (many) books in my collection which I have never read. Based on your "top five" comment, I will have to read it sometime.

I would be interested in knowing what your other four favorite books are as well. Can't get enough great book recommendations!

4:35 PM  
Blogger Frank Denton said...

Top Five: Kim, Treasure Island, Lord of the Rings, The Herries Chronicles, The Broad Highway. Top Five authors: John Buchan, H. Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, Sax Rohmer,Jeffrey Farnol. Let's get Serious: Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Hardy, Steinbeck, Hemingway.

4:54 PM  
Blogger Frank Denton said...

Top Five: Kim, Treasure Island, Lord of the Rings, The Herries Chronicles, The Broad Highway. Top Five authors: John Buchan, H. Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, Sax Rohmer,Jeffrey Farnol. Let's get Serious: Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Hardy, Steinbeck, Hemingway.

4:54 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home