The Sign of Four
The Sign of the Four (1890), also called The Sign of Four, is the second novel featuring Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2010–2016years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis (an old favorite, recommended)
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco (some interesting parts, but overall a disappointment)
Theology and Sanity - Frank Sheed (recommended; a very written description of the Catholic faith; weaknesses are it's long and it's aimed to a mid 20th c. audience)
Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal's Pensees - Peter Kreeft (recommended; a good exposition of Blaise Pascal's thought)
Catholicism: A journey to the heart of the faith - Robert Barron (recommended; a good explanation of Catholicism for the common person)
His Master's Voice - Stanislaw Lem (recommended; very intellectual look at the problem of first contact)
The Industries of the Future - Alec Ross (the robotics chapter is best; other parts are more light-weight; easy read)
Clouds of Witnesses - Dorothy Sayers (not my favorite Sayers mystery, but enjoyable)
A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle (recommended)
Why Gender Matters - Leonard Sax (recommended; most of the book is based on good science, but he does go out on a limb a time or two.)
Old School - Tobias Wolff (recommended; a world before widespread TV where high school boys actually got excited about literature)
Infinite Space, Infinite God - Karina and Robert Fabian editors (story quality varies; I enjoyed some of them)
The Sign of Four - Arthur Conan Doyle (recommended)
On Stranger Tides - Tim Powers (recommended; I love Powers, but Anubis Gates and Last Call are better. Still, if you like pirates you should like this)
The Art of Worldly Wisdom - Baltasar Gracian (interesting)
Aquinas at Prayer: the Bible, Mysticism, and Poetry - Paul Murray (recommended; this shows a different side of Thomas Aquinas)
Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy - Mortimer Adler (recommended; I almost think this should be required reading)
The Pilgrim's Regress - C.S. Lewis (I enjoyed it, but the ideas Lewis argues against are somewhat dated.)
Edit for formatting
- Completely agree. After meaning to do it for a while, I started doing a personal blog at this start of this month, at least once a day now. The big thing for me is I blog whatever observations I have that are quick, even if they're just okay. Then I keep a list of things that'd take me longer to write.
I remember looking at the bottom of a coffee lid and thinking about whether it should be face-up or face-down, so I took two pictures of it and posted it here - http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=38 - it's just sort of junk, but it helped get into the rhythym of writing every single day, no matter what. A lot of my entries are pretty mundane, but a couple of them have been quite popular and gotten spread around my friends and a couple other people I've met.
I think the biggest thing is that you're going to bad when you start. If you want encouragement, go look at the early works of prolific bloggers - often poorly written, tentative, scared, making mistakes, and writing for no audience. But doing it makes you improve. The biggest pieces of encouragement I got were reading the early works of Stephen King and the first Sherlock Holmes book. The Sign of Four (first Sherlock book) wasn't all that great of a piece of writing and was a commercial flop, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle kept going until his short stories caught on. Being a lover of Sherlock Holmes, I'm glad he did it. Also, it's encouraging towards getting started.
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