The Contradictions of Arthur Conan Doyle

As we have have the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in Merrick Library's list of Ten Books to Read before You Die, I thought I'd pass along an interesting article about a contradiction in the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Holmes stories.

Sherlock Holmes, as Doyle described him, was the the most rational of characters--a thinking machine some might say. In "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire," Doyle has Holmes say "This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply."

And yet, in real life, Doyle, who would be 150 years old this year, spent much time devoted to a belief in spiritualism. He attended seances and also wrote and spoke widely in favor of the spiritualist movement. Fans of the great detective can check this article for insight into Holmes' creator.

Orwell's Struggle to Finish 1984

I just came across an article about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the books on our list of 10 Books to Read Before You Die. It seems that at the same time that Orwell was trying to finish writing this novel he was mourning the death of his wife and fighting severe illness.

Check out this an interesting piece about what the author Robert McCrum calls "probably the definitive novel of the 20th century."

Reading, Not Readings

As the main purpose of this blog is to encourage reading, we wanted to note a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article by Mark Edmundson entitled "Against Readings." That's readings with an "s." "By a reading," Edmundson writes,"I mean the application of an analytical vocabulary — Marx's, Freud's, Foucault's, Derrida's, or whoever's — to describe and (usually) to judge a work of literary art." In other words, let's get back to reading books, without getting wrapped up in literary theory.

I remember reading another article about a young woman's disappointing experience as a graduate student in literature at Yale. At one point she asked one of her professors who her favorite authors were. The professor replied, "I don't read for pleasure anymore." Yikes!