Books I have read this year #4
When the World Screamed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I bought this from Bookfest a couple of weeks ago because of the title story (it has 7 short stories in it), which is a Professor Challenger story. I love him. He’s so delightfully offensive to modern readers and the science fiction he is involved with is so lovely and quaint, it’s great. The other stories… Lets just say that from this book I have learned that Conan Doyle enjoys writing about doctors, boxers, ghosts, mysteries and journalists. And combinations of the above. It was pretty fun overall (except for one story about boxers that bored me right until the end).
I particularly liked the last story, about journalists in a warzone, all getting very excited about the story that their own paper could publish when they start getting shot at. Oh, and in the second story (a mystery about a disappearing train) there was a subtle jab at Holmes: a solution to the mystery was sent in to a paper by an “amateur reasoner of the age who had gained some publicity recently”, an extract of which contained several Holmes-isms.
The language is hard work though. Book took me a good week to get through and isn’t that long. Conan Doyle has an amazing talent for fitting a buttload of information into a very short story and it can get tiring. I’d say it was worth it, though.
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