The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Housed in one superb volume, 'The Complete Sherlock Holmes' includes every Sherlock Holmes tale penned by the great Arthur Conan Doyle. With a linked table of contents, you can click on each and every chapter, making for easy navigation through this mammoth omnibus.Sherlock Holmes, the greatest fictional detective of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was the creation of Scottish born author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A brilliant London-based detective, Holmes is famous for his intellectual prowess, and is renowned for his skillful use of deductive reasoning and astute observation to solve difficult cases. He is arguably the most famous fictional detective ever created, and is one of the best known and most universally recognizable literary characters in any genre.Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories that featured Holmes.

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rramadassSep 2025

Sherlock Holmes said it best :-)

“Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! But, indeed, if you are trivial, I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools.

-- From "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Every kid should be given a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes canon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_of_Sherlock_Holmes) This will turn them towards learning and practicing "The Art of Deduction (or Ratiocination according to Edgar Allan Poe)" like nothing else and will directly lead to them understanding the importance of Logic and Science/Mathematics in today's world.

For example, as a kid growing up in 80s India, i read whatever i could get my hands on (eg. Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Enid Blyton, Alistair Maclean, Desmond Bagley, Frederick Forsyth etc. etc.) but none of them really made a mark. Then somebody gave me a copy of "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes" and i was zapped. Here was somebody who focused on reasoning and showed you the steps involved. Of course once you grew-up you realized that much of the "Deductions" were far-fetched/implausible but nevertheless the fire was lit. It directly led to my interest in Science/Mathematics and then a career in Software (much of Holmes' methods are directly applicable to Debugging).

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tzsApr 2017

There is one general problem I have with ebooks that limits them for me when it comes to technical books, but is generally not a problem for things like novels.

There is also a problem specific to Amazon ebook readers that holds me back from many technical books I would otherwise buy in ebook format.

First, the general problem. Suppose I am reading a 200 page mathematics book. I'm on page 150, and to understand something I want to review some point that was covered much earlier. I can close my eyes and visualize when I read that earlier point, and I get an image of the page it was on, where it was on that page, and how far it was into the book. I can pretty quickly jump back and find it.

This is not some "photographic memory" type thing. I don't "see" the page word for word, and cannot read the page number to know where to go. But I will get that the page I'm looking for had a diagram on the bottom and was a left side page, and that what I wanted was near the middle...that kind of thing.

It is enough that when combined with the way the pages are laid out in a physical sequence to give a sense of "place" to each page and the information on it. It seems kind of like a weak form of a memory palace.

With an ebook I do not get that sense of place as I read, and so if I need to find something much earlier in the book I have to rely on the search function or the table of contents, and often have to do a lot of paging around (which is slow on eInk readers). It usually takes a lot longer than it would have taken in the paper book.

The second problem, specific to Amazon's ereaders, is very inconsistent handling of images. For example I have some chess books that make extensive use of images for chess diagrams.

On my eInk Kindles, the chess diagrams are about the size of a postage stamp.

On the Kindle application for OS X, they are about the size that they would be in the paper book (in other words, they are the right size).

On the Kindle application for Windows, they are postage stamp sized.

On the Kindle Cloud Reader, the are the right size.

On the Kindle app for iOS they are the right size.

Same problem for math books. They often use images for equations. If those get the postage stamp treatment it makes that book very hard to deal with.

For things where images aren't needed, and where I'm not going to have to do a lot of looking back, I've greatly enjoyed reading on Kindle. Harry Potter was fine, for instance, as was the complete Sherlock Holmes stories.

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e15ctr0nMar 2017

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kapilkaisareSep 2010

Fiction:

1. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

2. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas : An awesome closeup of revenge

3. The complete Sherlock Holmes series : 'nuff said.

Non fiction:

1. Cosmos - Carl Sagan : I fell in love with science post-reading this book.

2. October Sky - Homer Hickham : A real life story of how a group of boys in a backwater town build a rocket that changes their lives.

3. Chariots of the Gods - Erich Von Daniken - A real mind bender, even if you choose not to agree with his ideas.

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lionheartedJan 2010

Patrick, I love you mate.

And I'm with you by the way. Kindle is changing the way I read. I'm not sure if I like it or not - I'm jumping around a lot more, because I don't have to worry about finishing a book to take off the large stack of books I'm traveling with. So I'm reading a little history, a little philosophy, a little fiction, and so on.

Anyways, while we're on the topic, may I recommend Gutenberg.org if you haven't already thoroughly perused it?

Here's a few you might like.

Their top 100:

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/731

Japanese literature including Genji Monogatari:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19264

Complete Sherlock Holmes:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1661

On War:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1946

All of Shakespeare:

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/s#a65

Thus Spake Zarathustra:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1998

Oh my, Gutenberg is just awesome. That's just the beginning of what I got. If you like literature, definitely try out Genji. If you haven't read On War, you simply must check it out - it teaches you how to think. At least read the first 20 pages, it's that valuable. Very incredible even if you don't care about history or military science, it's definitely been more valuable to me than Sun Tzu, and a lot of people like him.

As for Nietzsche... he's an odd duck, isn't he? Anyway, check out Zarathustra, you'll either love it or hate or both. I find myself disagreeing with quite a lot of it, but then occasionally he explains himself so completely perfectly and explains reality so succinctly and accurately. The good parts of Zarathustra are like Individualism Crack, it's a huge high reading and getting excited at.

There's lots more on Gutenberg, too! Almost everything out of print that's well known. I got 53 books from Gutenberg the day I got my Kindle so there's quite a lot I haven't gone through yet. Got copies of a lot of the foundational science texts to skim later for inspiration, etc. Really great stuff, highly recommend you spend some time on Gutenberg if you're the voracious reader.

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pidgeon_loverApr 2025

I'm disappointed to learn of this editing in Standard Ebooks, having had the misfortune to buy a Barnes & Noble copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes that had a similar approach taken. Book looks lovely, but has an altered chapter order, Americanised spellings and lots of typos. There is a certain amount of editing needed to render the likes of Shakespeare and Samuel Pepys readable, as Middle/Old English is quite a different language, but slight variants from 150ish years ago, or dialects, or the correct spelling according to the Queen's English, add flavour and should not be altered.

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