How Way Leads on to Way

I've been away. You may have noticed.  :P

My new job has taken a lot of adjusting to these past few weeks. I like the work, but traveling back and forth has eaten up much of my free time, and I'm still getting use to it. On top of that, my poor, lovely, stubborn mother has been in the hospital with an unusually nasty strain of pneumonia. She's back home and feeling better now, but I was worried for her. So, dear blog, I'm sorry, but you just haven't been a priority.

But since I've last visited, I've been reading a lot and enjoying my Netflix subscription and trying (trying!) my best to take it easy in my time off. I've been in a particularly fun sort of reading/television watching path--it's one of my favorite things about being out of school and being able to direct my own reading. I choose books with perfect freedom and whimsy, and I never run out of new strands of interest to follow. Each new book I read has the potential to sling me off into some new interest that I never expected to love. In reading as in life, as Frost puts it, "way leads on to way."

Most recently, I've been loving all things Sherlock Holmes, which I never in my life thought I would be interested in. I used to think that I didn't like mystery novels or crime stories, and police detectives in tweeds smoking pipes seemed like the dullest thing possible. But here's what happened:

• I watched that fantastically witty Doctor Who episode where Agatha Christie solves a real-life murder mystery involving a giant space wasp. (Yes, that episode is as awesome as it sounds.) -->
• Curious about Christie, I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, and Death Comes as the End. They were great--very clever and well written and British and astute. -->
• Thinking that I now liked old-fashioned British mysteries, I rented the new Sherlock Holmes action movie with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. I surprised myself by really, really enjoying it. -->
• Intrigued by the eccentricity of Holmes in the movie (drug use, bizarre fits of melancholia, a deep and curious jealousy of his friend Dr. Watson, etc.), I spent some time researching Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle on Wikipedia.  -->
• Curious about Doyle's writing and the oddity of Holmes as a character, I read two of the Holmes novels (A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles). They were fun, easy reading, as clear and fast-paced as if they'd been written in the late 20th century, not the late 19th. -->
• Because I enjoyed these novels, I decided to read Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice (which features Holmes in later life, living in semi-retirement in the 1920s and 1930s). -->
• King's version of Holmes was fantastically appealing, even better than the original! On top of the typical Holmes-style plot lines, there was a brilliant feminist female sleuth to keep Holmes in check (Mary Russell!) and a romantic sub-plot and really cool flapper clothing. So I read the next two novels in the series (The Monstrous Regiment of Women and A Letter of Mary) and loved them. -->
• Finally, I took Netflix's suggestion and started watching the Granada Sherlock Holmes series from the 1980s and 1990s with Jeremy Brett. I loved it and spent a good chunk of this weekend watching Holmes chase down Professor Moriarty and a dozen other amateur thieves and murderers. I never, ever thought I'd have an opinion about Dr. Watson as a narrator or the nattiness of Victorian-era men's clothing, but now I do. So yay!

So what's next? Inspired by King's Mary Russell novels, Downton Abbey's portrayal of pre-World War I Britain, and Ishiguro's conflicted post-World War II butler in  The Remains of the Day, I'll probably track down some more great modernist British literature. But who knows where I'll end up next?

Goodness, isn't reading fun?  :D