Currently reading
The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry: Volume I: Spenser to Crabbe
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Lord Jim
Aesop's Fables
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Yosemite and the High Sierra
Transcendent
The Official Highway Code
The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
The Nation's Favourite: Poems
A far less engaging mystery than A Study in Scarlet, with a ridiculous love story to boot, this Holmes novel is too dated to be enjoyable today. While there are three or four memorablly quotable short passages during the first ten chapters or so of the book, and the way Bartholomew Sholto discovers the treasure is inventive, the depiction of India is racist and virtually the whole story failed to excite any emotion in me other than distaste, and certainly not a redeeming intellectual interest. The descriptive writing is maddeningly run-of-the-mill (by Conan Doyle's standards), and the supporting cast, including the diaphonous dress-wearing Miss Morstan, are crudely drawn and stereotypical. It even feels like Watson and Holmes' parts were written without enthusiasm from the author.