Easy Reads: Sherlock Holmes

Here is yet another type of feature I plan to do on this blog. It's called Easy Reads.

Basically, I'm going to look at older books and talk about how well they hold up and whether a modern reader could understand them. Believe me, there are some older works that are incredibly hard to comprehend. I remember having to read "The Adventures of Roderick Random" for a class once. Boy... I'll just say it was rough.

So for this first installment of Easy Reads, I've decided to talk about Sherlock Holmes. Specifically, I want to talk about Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, and not those written by other authors.

Unlike Roderick Random, these stories are incredibly easy to understand and also incredibly fun to read.

I feel like everyone knows what Sherlock Holmes is about, but I'll just give a quick summary here anyway. The series follows Sherlock Holmes, a brilliant private investigator in 1890s London who uses scientific techniques and deductive reasoning to solve cases. Tagging along to record Holmes' adventures is his friend, Dr. John Watson.

Conan Doyle's run of Sherlock Holmes stories is comprised of four full novels and four collections of short stories. Each and every mystery is an incredibly fun read. Holmes and Watson take on cases ranging from murder most foul to strange happenings to conspiracies involving the KKK.

Holmes is just a great character, managing to be brilliant, arrogant, and ostentatious at the same time. Just like all stories in the mystery genre, it's always fun to try to put together the pieces of each mystery before Holmes explains the whole thing.

Highlights include stories "The Speckled Band", "Hound of the Baskervilles", and "The Sign of Four".

There aren't many flaws I can find with Conan Doyle's stories, but there are a few complaints I should note. One of them is that Watson seems a little too in awe of Holmes in all of the books. It's understandable in the first few stories, but the idolization keeps going book after book. However, that's a relatively minor complaint.

The other flaw I need to note is some of the casual racism that could be expected of a book written in the 1890s. There's nothing I would call absolutely egregious, but when Conan Doyle brings in some of his characters from more exotic locations, there's a definite vein of racism there. However, these characters are few and far between, and often are a very small part of the stories they appear in.

Overall, Sherlock Holmes would be a worthy addition to your collection, especially if you like mystery stories. You can bag the entire Conan Doyle library of Holmes stories on Kindle for only 99 cents. It's a heck of a bargain.