What I have been reading lately #43

Journey to Topaz - Yoshiko Uchida

Journey to Topaz is a novel about a Japanese-American girl named Yuki who is interned along with her family during World War II. I read this book out loud to my class of fifth graders.

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

This was Arthur Conan Doyle's first collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. Notice that the title does not have the word "the" in it.

I'm Not Scared - Niccolo Ammaniti

This novel is about a boy and his friends growing up in a remote part of Italy during the late 1970s. It is a thriller, and, despite the title, I found it to be very scary.

Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China - Guy Delisle

From the author of Pyongyang and Burma Chronicles, this book is about when Guy Delisle spent some time in China working for an animation studio. It is the last of Delisle's books like this.

The Sign of Four - Arthur Conan Doyle

This is probably my favorite of the Sherlock Holmes novels (as opposed to the story collections). Notice that it only has one "the" in the title.

Abandoned Books and/or Movies #7

The Fourteenth of July and the Storming of the Bastille by Christopher Prendergast

The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard by Arthur Conan Doyle

Oddly, both books are about France during the revolution and Napoleonic era. More oddly, I was enjoying both books but decided to stop reading them anyway.

What I have been reading lately #3

I recently finished reading The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, the last of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories about the British detective. This is not very remarkable, except that it means that, after almost thirty years of on-again, off-again reading, I have read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories Conan Doyle ever wrote - all four novels and all the collections of short stories. I didn't set out to read them all, and I can't honestly say that my time was very well spent, but now I am done.

In keeping with the mystery-theme, I am now reading Janwillem van de Wetering's Death of a Hawker. It's written in the late 1970's, set in Amsterdam, and features a pair of police detectives - Grijpstra and de Gier - who are trying to solve a murder (actually several). In general, I don't really like mysteries, and I don't read them very often.