When I embarked on a read-through of The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes back in early September I vaguely wondered if I might get through all the 1100+ pages by Christmas. But this was not to be. I'm at roughly the halfway mark now and I've decided the tome is too chunky to bother taking it with me halfway across the world. I'm also ready for a break from Holmes & Watson. The magic tends to wane somewhat when you move on relentlessly through tale after tale.
Another problem I'm finding is that for all his many virtues as a storyteller Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be a very clumsy writer in quite an irritating way. You start to notice how over-written so many of his villains are.
I suppose I'm rereading out of a sense of nostalgia and sometimes the rosy glow of the past proves not quite so glowing. Which leads me to a bigger conjecture: Real literature gets better on being re-engaged with after a decade or two. And Sir Arthur fails that test.
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