Okay, I get it. We are all busy people. Who’s got time to lie on the couch eating bonbons for hours and lapping up delicious 1,000-page stories about made-up people in made-up situations while our bosses are Slacking us and the television is beckoning and the real world is falling apart?
But, really, someone needs to speak up for long novels — for the hours of escape they promise, their fuller characters and the worlds they build. For making us more empathetic and forcing us to engage with the ideas of others. For the exercise of our underutilized imaginations and our declining attention spans.
The popular conception of Sherlock Holmes varies depending on who you talk to. The most basic image is that he’s the guy who smokes a pipe and wields both a magnifying glass and his intellect to solve mysteries. He’s a mercurial brainiac, someone so smart that he coldly dismisses anyone who isn’t his mental equal. If you crack open what's arguably the most important Sherlock Holmes book of all time, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, all of those impressions appear in some form or another. But what these generalizations leave out is that Holmes has all sorts of other moods—including total hilarity. In “The Red-Headed League,” after he and Watson burst into laughter over some absurd details of a mystery, Holmes says to a client, “There is if you will excuse me saying so, something just a little funny about it.” Most Holmes short story titles are each preceded by the phrase “The Adventure of…,” and when you re-read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, it makes sense. These are bonkers adventures first and complex mysteries second. 130 years later, it’s easy to see why this book is still so thrilling.
What might be the world’s oldest tree — a bristlecone pine named Methusaleh that is thousands of years old — is hidden in plain sight somewhere along the 4.5-mile Methuselah Trail in the Inyo National Forest in California. Even photos of it are rare — the internet is littered with pictures of old and gnarled bristlecone pines mislabeled as Methuselah.
“We do not give out the exact location or give photos out of the Methuselah tree, to keep it protected,” said Becky Hutto, a visitor center supervisor in the Inyo National Forest.
“Shrines of Gaiety” could be called an exercise in staginess; Atkinson threads a flagrant number of coincidences, near-misses, and winking foreshadowings (more than one character unwittingly predicts the manner of his own death) into the text. At the novel’s end, she doles out the future fates of her characters, with one gleeful exception; this brief nod to her metanarrative concerns gives the book a piquant finish. “Shrines of Gaiety” fulfills the guidelines of the genres it adopts: the missing girls are found, the historical setting richly elaborated, the romantic confusion conveniently sorted out, if not fully resolved. Yet, despite these technical satisfactions, Atkinson is never content to let her readers steep in the enjoyment of a plot tidily concluded. In this case, she hints at the idea that undergirds all of her historical fiction: no matter how closely we examine or imagine the past, the idea that we might fully understand it is always an illusion.
Though the mystery remains at the heart of the novel, Hamdy’s work becomes quite philosophical, asking and attempting to answer huge questions about the nature of life, death and time.
Her previous work skips genres and times with similar fluidity. Now, Moreno-Garcia's enthralling new novel, "The Daughter of Doctor Moreau," deftly blends 19th-century science fiction with a 21st-century sensibility.
Pink seafoam leaves odd gifts for me to find:
a puffed-up man-o-war, a mermaid’s purse,