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A Study in Sherlock - stories inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon
This is - well, a very diverse short story collection. All the stories are related in one way or another to Sherlock Holmes, whether actually set in the Sherlock Holmes verse (like Neil Gaiman's The Case of Death and Honey about Sherlock going to China and keeping bees, or S.J. Rozan's The Men with the Twisted Lips, where Limehouse's opium dealers arrange for Sherlock to get a case), other deal with stories where Sherlock-as-fiction is involved (like Charles Todd's The Case that Holmes Lost, where Conan Doyle's latest story gets a bit too close to an actual murder), and others again feature modern day detectives-with-Watsons solving various cases (I quite liked Dana Stabenow's The Eyak Interpreter, which is told through blog posts and has an interesting setting and makes me want to go read that series). All in all, a very diverse collection - for better or worse, admittedly, but isn't that always the case with short story collections?
Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature - why violence has declined
This is an extremely interesting book. The author's premise is that - contrary to the impression that you might get from watching the news - we are actually living in quite possibly the most peaceful and non-violent and safe period in history. Ever. That we have fewer wars, fewere genocides, fewer murders, fewer rapes, fewer - well, everything. And I'm not even going to start trying to sum it up and reference the arguments - Pinker's written an 800 pages book with lots and lots of statistics, I'm not going to try to do that here - but it's interesting and well worth a read. (Mind you, I quite like that one of the suggestions he offers for why we have spent the last centuries getting nicer and nicer, is because more people read more books).
Total number of books and comics read this month: 25
Currently reading: 1Q84 vol. 2 by Haruki Murakami, Queer Buccaneers by Heiko Steinhoff and Dr. Albert Merlings samlede bedrifter bind 2. by Knud V. Larsen
This is - well, a very diverse short story collection. All the stories are related in one way or another to Sherlock Holmes, whether actually set in the Sherlock Holmes verse (like Neil Gaiman's The Case of Death and Honey about Sherlock going to China and keeping bees, or S.J. Rozan's The Men with the Twisted Lips, where Limehouse's opium dealers arrange for Sherlock to get a case), other deal with stories where Sherlock-as-fiction is involved (like Charles Todd's The Case that Holmes Lost, where Conan Doyle's latest story gets a bit too close to an actual murder), and others again feature modern day detectives-with-Watsons solving various cases (I quite liked Dana Stabenow's The Eyak Interpreter, which is told through blog posts and has an interesting setting and makes me want to go read that series). All in all, a very diverse collection - for better or worse, admittedly, but isn't that always the case with short story collections?
Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature - why violence has declined
This is an extremely interesting book. The author's premise is that - contrary to the impression that you might get from watching the news - we are actually living in quite possibly the most peaceful and non-violent and safe period in history. Ever. That we have fewer wars, fewere genocides, fewer murders, fewer rapes, fewer - well, everything. And I'm not even going to start trying to sum it up and reference the arguments - Pinker's written an 800 pages book with lots and lots of statistics, I'm not going to try to do that here - but it's interesting and well worth a read. (Mind you, I quite like that one of the suggestions he offers for why we have spent the last centuries getting nicer and nicer, is because more people read more books).
Total number of books and comics read this month: 25
Currently reading: 1Q84 vol. 2 by Haruki Murakami, Queer Buccaneers by Heiko Steinhoff and Dr. Albert Merlings samlede bedrifter bind 2. by Knud V. Larsen
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