"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))

Monday, July 15, 2024

The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902)

Read an electronic version of this classic while flying to and fro Phoenix -> Bangalore.  Perfect airplane reading material.

Much of my memory of the book is intertwined with memories of the 1939 movie starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce - a favorite as we were growing up; the younger siblings made a tape recording and then a typed transcript. The movie also delights, if varying in some respects from the book.

Anyway - the detective is hired to get to the bottom of a mystery on the moors - a legendary, huge hound-like fiend that haunts the Baskervilles over the generations.  Dr. Mortimer brings in Holmes.  Watson stays on the moor.  Stapleton and his "wife" live nearby; he is a naturalist.  Barrymore - butler - and his wife and brother.

Laura Frankland wrote to Sir Hugo - I don't really recall that part in the movie.

I would avoid the Grimpen Mire.

Great read.  

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