Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I have now conquered the complete Sherlock Holmes.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes, #9) by Arthur Conan Doyle

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I’m glad he went for one more round. I liked all of these better than the ones in His Last Bow. Because I’m fast running out of review posting time, I’m copying and pasting all my mini-reviews for this book. I will hopefully put up a real review on Goodreads HERE within the next couple of days, and also a full review of The Complete Sherlock Holmes HERE. I’m not posting it on CBR because I’ve already counted all nine books to my tally this […]

“You are the one fixed point in a changing age.”

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This is the shortest Holmes story collection: only eight stories and a preface written by Watson, explaining that Holmes is now retired to Sussex and keeping bees, and here are some stories he hasn’t yet published about their adventures, including their very last one. (All the stories in the last published book, The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes, apparently take place before “His Last Bow” as well.) Because of the shortness, you feel it a little bit more when a story is a dud. In particular, […]

Probably my least favorite of these books.

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I liked this, I did. But the first half was just an extended Holmes story (a pretty good one!), while the second half was basically pointless. I don’t think this should have been a full length novel. The content of the story just doesn’t justify it. The Valley of Fear was published in full in 1915 (after being serialized in The Strand of course), so by this point, Conan Doyle had been writing the character for almost thirty years. (This was also around the time […]

“Holmes,” I cried. “Is it really you?”

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While gathering my thoughts to start writing this review, I kept getting the feeling that this was my favorite of the Holmes story collections so far. With this feeling in mind, I moseyed on over to Goodreads to look at my status updates to try to collect evidence to back it up (I rate and do mini-reviews for every story), whereupon I found to my surprise that my reaction to most of the stories was just good, not great. It’s a solid story collection! However, only two out […]

Holmes: better left alone

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The first pick for my library book club came in with a whimper. Overall, we (self included) didn’t really like this book. This was an interesting endeavor because King takes Sherlock’s Holmes out of retirement, and back into the fray, with the addition of the plucky Mary Russell, a whip smart teenager who befriends Holmes and keeps him on his toes. In addition to Holmes there is the familiar cast of characters: Mrs. Hudson, Watson, and Mycroft. Watson is more secondary as Russell serves to […]

My Dear Dodson

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I have not read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes work so I’m only half familiar with the many references here and in other knockoffs. I get “Dodson” as “Watson” and this being a take on The Hound of the Baskervilles but beyond that, anything else was beyond me. So I went into this more interested in the story itself as opposed to how it matches up with its inspirational texts. And it’s mostly a good story. Joe Ide is a quality writer and this is a […]



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