All I can say right now is: What the @#*&$ did I just read?? It’s almost as if Alan Moore is secretly laughing at all the suckers who bought this. I need to process this.
I have long loved the Sherlock Holmes stories, since I was introduced to them when I was pretty young. I was so enamoured by the stories that it played a big part in my deciding to go to UK for my tertiary studies, just so I can steal a trip down to London to visit 221B Baker Street (I was a little bit of a let-down, looking back after so many years, but it was a dream come true nonetheless).
As big a fan as I was, however, I have never yet managed to completely read the canon of stories from Doyle, despite owning multiple editions of the stories, including my absolute treasure: The Original Illustrated ‘Strand’ Sherlock Holmes, which is a compendium of all of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Doyle, reproduced with all the original illustrations from the pages of the Strand magazine as they first appeared!
I was pleased to find not to long ago that Audible held a sale and I saw The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes, Volumes 1 and 2 being sold at a very tempting price, and seeing that I’m getting a lot of reading done on the road, and relishing the chance to rekindle my love for the detective, I got them both.
Volume 1 consists of two novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, followed by a collection of short stories entitled The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
What can I say, aside from the fact that if you haven’t yet sampled Sherlock Holmes, what the heck are you doing reading my silly reviews than to head down to your nearest bookstore (or online store), buy the darn books and start reading? The short stories are in an easily digestible format, and leads you on to a great adventure in detection. Delightful stories that will have you thinking long after you’ve finished them. Classics such as A Scandal in Bohemia, The Adventure of the Red-Headed League, The Adventure of the Speckled Band are all here.
What struck me was the quality of the stories of those that aren’t so famous in this collection, and I’ve always wondered about the fact that some of these stories must be of variable quality to be excluded from the general mindset (unlike say Speckled Band, which I think most English readers would have heard of at one time or another being associated with Sherlock Holmes). On a whole, however, I found the stories to be more or less pretty good.
Because I’m listening to them one after another in a continuous fashion, and maybe due to a most excellent reader in Charlton Griffin, I’m picking up some very distinctive Doyle mannerisms in the stories. Sherlock Holmes has a tendency to say ‘pray continue your most interesting statement’, or some variation of this when a client starts to tell their conundrums. And the word ‘singular’ comes up in almost every story – a most ‘singular occurrence’ or most ‘singular event’. And the deductions – sometimes to my jaded mind that some of the deductions seem far fetched. But not nearly as much as the ones from the latter stories.
In all, my favourite stories from this collection include:
More from the succeeding collections, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
Over the years I have been hankering for a mechanical keyboard, ever since I saw the Das Keyboard. It wasn’t the look of the keyboard so much (although a completely label-less keyboard does project a not-undesirable l33t factor), but the promise of a durable, comfortable, and most importantly, the promise of a very audible keyboard click as you tap.
I don’t know when I had this idea that the sound a keyboard makes somehow would influence my joy in typing on a keyboard, but it does. There’s a very satisfying assurance and some unspeakable pleasure that emanates from typing on such a keyboard. Since I type reasonably fast, and I type *a lot*, I was looking forward to getting one of these babies.
So fast forward to the present. I have long believed that Malaysia doesn’t stock mechanical keyboards. Imagine my surprise that about a month ago, I found out that Razer has recently created a mechanical keyboard called the BlackWidow. After dilly-dallying for a while, I sunk the cash and carried my new toy home.
The one I got was the BlackWidow, not the Ultimate edition (which sports USB and audio jacks, along with backlit keys).
My first impression after I unpacked it was that it was heavy. I love the weight, and it certainly wouldn’t be sliding around your desk. My second impression was that the keys were a little cramped. I was used to the standard Microsoft/Logitech full-sized keyboard (not the compact design crap where they rearrange the keys to make the whole keyboard smaller, which forces you to take a few days to get used to it, and then screws up all your bearings when you use an actual keyboard on another machine). The BlackWidow does seem smaller somehow, and my first few sentences on it came out as gibberish. However, it’s still a full-sized keyboard, and after getting used to the orientation, the speed came back pretty quickly.
It has a row of special macro keys on the furthest left of the keyboard, which caused some irritation when I reached for the left-hand SHIFT and CTRL.
However. However. The keys are magnificent to type. The clicks and taps sound full and very satisfying, and they key-presses triggers a tactile switch that makes it a pleasure as my fingers dance through the keyboard. I found out pretty quickly that not all my colleagues were fans of the noise. I wasn’t going to leave it in the office, so lucky them.
Since I’ve never yet tried any other mechanical keyboards, I don’t really know how this compares with something like the Das Keyboard, or the SteelSeries7G/6G. One thing they do have going for them is the fact that they are not really so out-and-out gaming centric, a looks a little more subtle, but that’s not exactly a big problem for the BlackWidow (at least for me).
Looking forward the many millions of key-presses on this baby.
Really, I don’t know why I persist in calling these posts ‘reviews’. They are more like thoughts. Anyway.
Unlike most people, I did not have problems reading the book, in fact I rather enjoyed it. That’s because I didn’t *read* it, but rather listened to it as an audiobook. Facetious, I know, but hey, I got through the book. And the experience was generally positive. I can imagine that as a book 2666 would present a huge challenge to me, because it’s very testing in places. But it was very easy to digest this monster of a book during my daily commute, as the story was being read out by supremely talented actors. Even as an audiobook there are sections of the novel that was hard to get through, but I did manage to get the complete 40 hours it required. But a little more on that later.
A bookish background then. My previous Bolano was By Night in Chile, which was the first 100-odd-page novel to defeat me completely. It was laced with so many South American literary, historical and cultural references that was just too much for your average Malaysian Chinese reader to truly relate to, not to mention the fact the book was narrated by a character who would fit right in with the Mad Hatter (if Bolano was an eccentric, slightly crazy Englishman). The psychedelic experience didn’t stop me from leaping at the chance to try 2666, though, as the waves of good reviews for the book meant that it was something that I had to sample. But I braced myself for a wild, barely coherent, ride.
Imagine my surprise that I actually could understand the novel this time. Not that it was easy, mind you.
There are 5 interlinked stories within this huge tome, each pretty much an own book in it’s own right. These stories are very varied and loosely tied together by a few commonalities. But the largest character in the story isn’t even a person; it’s the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, which is Bolano’s version of Cuidad Juarez, a place infamous for its rapid industrial growth and high crime rate. There’s a singular chain of violent events in Juarez that clearly inspired the backdrop for 2666.
The first story is about 4 literary critics of an obscure German author named Benno von Archimboldi (and after a quick wiki search, I ascertained that Archimboldi was also fictional. Hey, Bolano sprinkled names of actual authors in there, ok?). They travel to Santa Teresa in hopes of finding this elusive author, and in the course of the story learns something of their journey and of themselves. The second, a story centered around a supporting character in the first story. The third is of an American journalist, who arrives in Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match but ends up working towards a story about the violent events in the city.
By far the most striking feature of the novel was the contents of the fourth book, which is made up almost entirely of a catalogue of murders that occurred in Santa Teresa. Clearly inspired by the real life events, in the book Santa Teresa is the setting where hundreds of women were killed in a short period of a few years, and Bolano took to listing out, almost hypnotically, how each of the murder was carried out. How the body was found, how old the victim was (most were young), at what state the body was in, whether the victim was sexually assaulted or not, and so on and so forth (probably not every murder, but by the fiftieth killing you kind of lose track). The result was a hugely bleak and depressing novel. A lot of the victims were young teens barely out of their childhood, and this did not make easy listening. This section of the novel served, as a friend commented, to numb the reader to the violence, and by jolly did it succeed brilliantly. By the end of the section you have a sense of complete and utter helplessness, a silent fury at the authorities who seem impotent at addressing the issue. At parts the book even hinted at those in power being complicit in these crimes.
To tie it all up, the fifth story centres around a young German soldier called Hans Richter, who eventually grows into an author of some stature, and later in life discover ties that sends him to Santa Teresa.
The story is sprawling, with lots of jaunts to places that you aren’t always entirely sure whether it belongs to the larger narrative. In the first book, there’s an underlying history about a fatalistic artist who chopped off his own hand, had it embalmed and set it as a centrepiece of a huge work of art. The text goes some way into explaining the backstory of this fascinating individual, but there’s nothing there to indicate he’s directly involved in the main plot, besides serving as an allegory or as a metaphorical symbol that I cannot grasp. And the dreams. Everyone dreams here, and the dreams are strange, haunting, frightening.
The writing is pretty interesting. There’s a languid, not quite plodding quality. At times rambling when describing the most mundane of coffeeshops, other times sparse like the desert surrounding the maquiladora in Santa Teresa. Bolano took his time with the words, and the one thing that I realized was how much more effort it would have taken to digest the work when actually read, as opposed to it having performed for you.
Speaking of performance, a word on the voice actors. Each of the 5 books were narrated by different male actors, and they did a magnificent job. The characters had at turns German, French, Italian, Spanish, American and English English accents, and the actors did a fabulous job on them.
The novel doesn’t have an ending in the traditional sense, as Bolano actually originally planned to have these five books to stand individually. Still, the novel attempts to bring the events in all the books to a full circle, and seemed to me managed it to some extent. I’m a stickler for a very tidy summation, and I have to say the story doesn’t answer all the questions, but still it made many people deliriously happy at this monument of a novel.
I cannot say I loved the novel, as it lays a little beyond my literary comprehension capabilities at present. It was surely enjoyable and incredibly educational journey.
And one last thing. The fifth book was about Archimboldi’s early life, his start into writing and his emergence as a prominent writing. Early part of his career his publisher asked a critic what he thought of Archimboldi’s work. The critic thought his work was reminiscent of a Malaysian writer! I’m not kidding – I almost fell off my chair when I heard this (except I was driving, and falling off my seat in the car would… nevermind). A couple of things crossed my mind: First, Bolano mentioned Malaysia, how cool is that! Second, Bolano almost certainly pulled that out of his ass, because there were no Malaysian authors of prominence that I could think of that would warrant a comparison (even to a fictional author!) at the time, unless he read Malay, which I’m willing to bet that he did not. Even then it seems unlikely.
Watching Joko Suprianto v Zhao Jian Hua at the All-England 1990 Mens Singles Finals at present. As the match wore on, it became clear the little differences between the game played in those days and the games played now. In an earlier blog post I had wondered how you could compare the greats of yesteryears against those of today, given that so much has changed since then. But the video was very illustrative – the players from before were slower, were more inclined to lift the shuttles, the footwork comprised of seemingly more steps, net shots were nowhere as tidy and close to the net cord as they are today. Every time a net shot was played I kept expected the opponent to pounce on it.
Plus they didn’t ask for shuttle changes all that often too.
When heroes and expectations fall, the beggar lauds the dime. When someone wants to do it all, but cannot find the time.
Suffice to say that made no sense, but nobody will mind. With time I hope to find the will, to write a better line.