Background bit no. 1:
During my Second Decade Reading Plan, I revisited Sherlock Holmes canon: all four novels and all fifty-six short stories. At the end of those ten years, I knew that I would one day want to read them all yet again – all, that is, except for A Study in Scarlet. The first couple of chapters, in which Watson meets Holmes for the first time, are priceless and indispensable. But on the second reading, after I had found the American backstory involving the vengeful Mormon town once again a tedious diversion from the main attraction, I decided to leave that novel out of my next run-through. (I guess I could say in Doyle’s defense that he didn’t know yet that he had just introduced one of the greatest characters in the history of literature and shouldn’t leave him out of almost half of the book.)
Background bit no. 2:
For a long time, perhaps as long as I’ve been following to ten-year reading plans, I’ve been playing computer logic puzzles by Everett Kaser. I usually play at least one every day. The puzzles use little pixel-art pictures and icons and involve graphic clues that tell you, for instance, that the apple is in the same column as the Japanese flag or that the hammer is above and to the right of the rose. Many involve paths or mazes that must be put together by following the clues to discover where walls and doors are placed. The one I’ve been playing the most lately is something like Slitherlink, but the player has to figure out where the clues go in the grid as well as determining the looping path that satisfies the clues. I love it!
The titles of the games group themselves into several themes. Some games are named after, I presume, family members: “Willa’s Walk,” for instance, and “Floyd’s Bumpershoot.” Others are named after famous mathematicians. The most common theme, though, is Sherlock Holmes. The set is made up of “Inspector Lestrade,” “Baker Street,” “Mrs. Hudson,” “Moriarty’s Dinner,” “Reichenbach Falls,” and several others, including the one with the apples and the Japanese flags, which is entitled simply “Sherlock.” (The games cost more than you may be used to in an age of free phone apps. But you can try each one for free, they don’t include ads, each includes hundreds of puzzles at each of various levels of difficulty, and Everett himself might call you personally if you have any problems. I’ve had one problem in thirty years, and he certainly helped me.)
Main point of today’s post:
One of the latest Kaser puzzle games is “Beckett’s Books,” which presents classic books, one two-page spread at a time, with the pages torn up into little squares. The player places the pieces with margin first (like the edge pieces of a jigsaw puzzle) and then, following the spelling and sense of the words and the patterns of white space at the beginning and end of each paragraph, puts the interior pieces in position so the text can be read.
I tried the free demo first, which offered five pages of each of five books. When I paid for the full version, which book did I inexplicably decide to continue? Of course Everett included the first Sherlock novel in his game of reassembling books through deductive reasoning! So there I was for several months earlier this year, reading A Study in Scarlet, two pages per day. All of that to say that, maybe because of the unusual format and pace of reading or maybe just because my expectations were so low, the book was interesting all the way through – even the chapters in Utah. Now I’m really looking forward to rereading the other three novels and the fifty-six stories over the course of my fourth decade of scheduled reading.
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