#get the annotated dracula and sherlock holmes

[greenycrimson]

Details about Aziraphale's name are in the second note if you go to the L-space annotations for the book. - [p. vii] "[...] the angel, whose name was Aziraphale."

On the subject of the correct pronunciation of the name, Terry says:

"It should be Azz-ear-raf-AE-el, but we got into the habit of pronouncing it Azz-ear-raf-ail, so I guess that's the right way now."

And about the name's origin:

"It was made up but... er... from real ingredients. [The name] Aziraphale could be shoved in a list of 'real' angels and would fit right in..."

For instance, Islam recognizes the Archangels Jibril, Mikhail, Azrael (see also the annotation for p. 9 of Reaper Man ), and Israfel (the subject of Edgar Allan Poe's well-known poem of the same name), whereas from Christianity we get such names as Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, and Uriel.

neil, is there any particular reason why most angels' names end with -ael or -iel? with the exceptions of metatron, sandalphon, and aziraphale of course.

Angelic names tend to discuss the relationship of the angel to god, or be a description of an aspect of god. The "El" at the end of angelic names means "God" (or more precisely "god" because it can refer to lots of different gods).

Iirc Michael means "who is like God?", Gabriel means "my strength comes from God", Uriel means "light of God", Saraqael means "beloved by God" and Muriel means "smells like God".

[poetlcs]

classic lit is the only genre of book I buy every time because I just like to annotate and keep note thus I decided to make a read vs to be read of my classics as right now I do have a lot piled up I've been meaning to get to ALSO! I just like talking about classic lit

so please let me know which I should prioritise

physical tbr classics

zami: a new spelling of my name by audre lorde

a room with a view by em forster

the professor by charlotte bronte

a passage to india by em forster

mrs dalloway by virginia woolf

the last tycoon by f.scott fitzgerald

jamaica inn by daphne du maurier

if beale street could talk by james baldwin

howards end by em forster

dr jekyll and mr hyde by robert louis stevenson

antony and cleopatra by william shakespheare

a clockwork orange by anthony burgess

read classics below cut for my tracking

pre 1500s:

the iliad by homer

oedipus the king

1500-1800

the merchant of venice, hamlet, much ado about nothing, king lear pericles, the tempest, othello, measure for measure by william shakespheare

1800-1900

a tale of two cities, hard times, great expectations by charles dickens

heart of darkness by joseph conrad

jane eyre by charlotte bronte

wuthering heights by emily bronte

the tenant of wildfell hall by anne bronte

sherlock holmes by arthur conan doyle

the mill on the floss by george eliot

cousin phyllis by elizabeth gaskell

the moonstone by wilkie collins

little women by louisa may alcott

dracula by bram stoker

maurice, where angels fear to tread by em forster

sense and sensibility, persuasion, emma, pride and prejudice, northanger abbey by jane austen

the turn of the screw by henry james

frankenstein by mary shelley

treasure island by robert louis stevenson

the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde

black beauty by anna sewell

peter pan by jm barrie

1900-1970

on the road by jack kerouac

dubliners, ulysses by james joyce

the great gatsby, tender is the night by f. scott fitzgerald

rebecca, the house on the strand by daphne du maurier

notes of a native son, giovanni's room by james baldwin

childhood by tove ditlevson

letters to a young poet by rainer maria rilke

voss by patrick white

my brilliant career by miles franklin

nightwood by djuna barnes

brideshead revisted by evelyn waugh

their eyes were watching god by zora neale hurston

one hundred years of solitide by gabriel garcia maquez

wide sargasso sea, good morning midnight by jean rhys

passing by nella larson

the waste land, the lovesong of j.alred prufrock by t.s eliot

to the lighthouse, a room of ones own by virginina woolf

to kill a mockingbird by harper lee

sula by toni morrison

endgame by samuel beckett

things fall apart by chinua achebe

lord of the flies by willian golding

death of a salesman by arthur miller

a streetcar named desire by tenneesee williams

animal farm by george orwell

[mybookof-you]

NG: So the biggest difference, it seems to me, between Lovecraft and some of your earlier annotations, is that with Sherlock Holmes, you began annotating the stories from the intellectual position that Sherlock Holmes existed, that Watson existed, and that Conan Doyle was just writing down stuff that had happened to them, and wherever it didn’t actually make sense, you needed to explain why.

LK: Right. This is what Sherlockians call “the game.” It’s very productive of interesting avenues of study. When you approach the stories that way, you get a lot more juice out of them, because if these are historical documents, then we can justify examining in minute detail the cultural and historical elements that serve as background in the stories. Plus, Sherlockians love to argue about “Why did Holmes do that instead of this,” “He got this case wrong,” and so on. So that was the approach, there. For Dracula, I did a mixture. Lovecraft was different, but not quite as different as you might imagine, because Lovecraft himself said that to write a great supernatural tale, it was critical that it be done like a hoax. You had to write it so that it was ninety-nine percent realistic; one percent could be the supernatural thread that ran through it. And so, there’s that incredible amount of detail to work with: historical, cultural, scientific, amazing stuff in the background.

Leslie Klinger and Neil Gaiman interview

raintaxi.com

[atundratoadstool]

Hi! You mentioned that Leslie Klinger has a lot of inaccuracies in his annotated Dracula; I participated in the Rosenbach's "Sundays with Dracula" program (on their youtube if you're interested) and a lot of us used his book (and he was even a guest lecturer). Can you point me to some places where I can learn more about the inaccuracies, or get more accurate/balanced info? Thanks!!

Some part of the problem with using Klinger's text is just trying to navigate his "gentle fiction" that the events of the novel all reflect things that really happened. It results in a lot of nitpicks on his part that serve no interpretive function other than taking what feel like cheap potshots at the characters, and I think in those sorts of quibbles he lifts some of the biases from Clive Leatherdale where he builds upon his work (and Leatherdale is--in my humble opinion--grossly sexist and victim blamey). Beyond that, something that really struck me when reading his annotations (and I have a lot of exasperated marginalia in my copy of Klinger's text) is how frequently he seems to rely on either Stoker's 19th century research sources or on the work of other non-Eastern-European Dracula scholars when trying to paint a picture of Transylvania. He largely knows his stuff as far as the Stoker's source texts go, but Stoker's source texts are incredibly outdated and racist, and a lot of his notes don't really try to reach past them.

To offer one example from a place in the text Dracula Daily readers have already passed, Klinger asserts that the innkeepers at the Golden Krone are probably Hungarian and Roman Catholic on account of their slight knowledge of German and their gift of a crucifix (pg. 25, note 51). However, in making this assertion, he doesn't acknowledge that the woman is wearing traditional Romanian clothing or that forced Magyarization policies in the nineteenth-century would have led to numerous Romanians being forcibly converted to Catholicism from Eastern Orthodoxy. He also fails to mention that the folk beliefs they are mentioning are attributed to Romanians by one of Stoker's sources (Emily Gerrard) and that one of Stoker's other sources (Nina Mazuchelli) notes that all innkeepers in the Carpathians speak a smattering of German. As his "gentle fiction" makes it impossible for him to acknowledge that these people are fictional constructs and not real flesh and blood human beings, he isn't able to present them as being contradictory and not entirely well thought out composites resulting from Stoker's flawed research. However, his attempts to paint them as real nineteenth-century Transylvanians living their nineteenth century lives also falls short because he doesn't quite seem able to picture Catholic Romanians who speak a little German as individuals who might have existed in Bistritz at the time.

Honestly Klinger is a great resource in a lot of ways, and I am always going to be grateful for his work in getting the reading public access to manuscript content (and in fighting the good fight as regards copyright battles re: Sherlock Holmes). I'd advise people using his New Annotated Dracula, however, to be very cautious in using his work insofar as it addresses Transylvania and to take a lot of his commentary on the characters' failings with a large grain of salt.

[hergan416]

This feels like the exact right place to add my thoughts about imperialism in yuumori as a direct result of The Man With the Golden Army arc in part 1, and that is that the main cast's attitudes are more liberal towards other countries than would have been period-typical, but only in the sense that their attitudes strike me as having a distinctly modern isolationist bent. It feels more like the way that their attitudes towards England itself are ahistoric, and are written with hindsight in mind to tell a story to modern readers.

[An aside: This logic is the same as I use when adding modern phrases into canon-setting fanfic that feel right, or especially when I allow characters to mouthpiece more modern attitudes about sex and sexuality. Even historical erotica, designed to get people off, had more subtextual shame than I write in my fanfic, despite the fact I usually keep the characters relatively conservative on this topic by modern, and especially by fandom, standards. All this to say that I see the mixture of modern and historic as a consistent feature of yuumori's characterization.]

But, back on the topic of imperialism, most stories written at the time, including ACD Holmes, have some extremely uncritical colonial bias when dealing with the colonies and "exotic" countries. Specifically, the Sign of Four and A Study in Scarlet can be very orientalist at points. I can't comment on the full spread of Sherlock Holmes books, because I only got through a few right away after reading yuumori before moving on to other historic research and ultimately getting caught up in life and continuing none of it. But these early novels each have long sections that break away from Watson's narration to describe far away places in less-than accurate, exotic-sounding ways. [I don't know India that well, but his description of Utah's desert and Native American people in A Study in Scarlet would be offensive and misinformed if written by a modern author. On India, I will say that ACD's description of the artifacts that were brought back to England feels quite similar to how Wilde uses foreign objects for Aesthetic purposes in The Picture of Dorian Gray (prompting a footnote in the annotated edition that basically said "writing like this wasn't racist then"). My impression of the depiction of the country and its war was that it was in the same style of Doyle's description of Utah, I just don't have specific inaccuracies to point at.] I also want to point to the exoticism of Bram Stoker's description of Romania in Dracula as another example of what I see as a the Victorian attitude towards foreign places in literature.

I wanted more than just literature as a stepping stone, however, and so attempted to do some research about British domestic attitudes about the Afghan and Indian wars at the time to see how isolationist the country really was. I ... found journal articles to read at my library. Specifically a political journal based out of Britain with articles about both wars but I still have yet to read them, which is why this meta never got made after reading the Man with the Golden Army Arc in the manga.

In an effort to actually get to my remaining valentines day prompts, plus literally anything in my WIPs folder, I'm going to leave that open for me to come back to at the moment, because I don't think it's necessary. I think that the difference between yuumori's narration and the attitude of its character is distinct enough from the narrative attitude of books written by actual Victorian authors and their characters to make the claim that William is not a typical Victorian in that sense.

His sensibilities seem to be more like "there are domestic problems, and they are more important than our foreign problems. Having too much foreign problems will endanger England's ability to focus on and fix domestic problems." He also just does not come across as having as noticeable of a superiority complex about England as a country in comparison to its colonies or anywhere else in the world as I've noticed as typical for Victorian-written protagonists. (Although that could also have a bit to do with format. You get fewer character thoughts in manga than you do in novels.)

However, I also don't think that supporting British imperialism, colonization, etc. is necessarily out of character for him. He doesn't really address ... any of it in P1 other to say that domestic issues are more important, and to make the point in the Man with the Golden Army that he is more righteous in his cause because he, and all his agents, were willing to die for the Moriarty Plan. In fact, he never gets into an argument about principals beyond that in the arc - while he very much could have made a point about exploitation. There is an implication that his plan and the plan he stops have similar moral justifications, the sacrifice of a few for the benefit of the many, even if that plan is significantly more authoritarian than his plan is.

Plus, he has been working for fucking Pinkerton's for three years - yes, a glorified, ahistoric version of Pinkerton's we can feel good (better?) about than the real institution would have been at the time. But there are still some major implications to him working at a private detective agency, now barred from US Federal contracts due to their actions, whose primary contracts at the time would have been union busting.

I've only really seen chapter 1 of part 2 so far because of what fans have managed to translate (I'll buy the tankobon when it becomes available and point google lens at it eventually, regardless of the speed of the fan translation), but it does seem clear that foreign policy is going to be a major theme from what I've read so far. Of course, it's hard to say what that will look like. But it will be interesting to see how it's treated for sure.

Do you think Moriarty the Patriot Part 2 would touch on colonization and suffrage? I mean, the British empire did a lot of terrible shit on their colonies such as the ones in the Global South during that time. I understand it might be a touchy subject that too hot to handle but I really don't want to see Team Moriarty going "Yay British imperialism" which is out of character from them.

Honestly, probably not.

And I honestly don't know if it is out of character for them. They love their country. They want to fix their country. They really don't ever mention a care for other countries.

I don't think either of the original stories talk about the global south much (although I say that not having read either), so it would have to be added by the Japanese author and...look, Japan is pretty bad at handling imperialism in stories most of the time. It has a lot of issues of its own to reckon with there.

And it was pretty much ignored in Part 1, too, so I suspect more of the same honestly. Maybe I'll be wrong! But I suspect we're just never going to hear much about it.

[twistedtummies2]

Ele-May-ntary - Number 4

Welcome to Ele-May-ntary! All throughout the month of May, I’ve been counting down my Top 31 Favorite Portrayals of Sherlock Holmes, from movies, television, radio, and even video games! We’re growing closer to the end of this countdown, and our last few Holmes portrayals are arguably some of the most definitive and nostalgic. Today’s entry is no exception. Number 4 is…Peter Cushing.

Peter Cushing was a phenomenal and versatile actor best known for his appearance as the Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars, as well as his roles as Professor Van Helsing and Dr. Frankenstein in various Hammer Horror movies. Alongside these roles, however, Cushing also made a name for himself playing Sherlock Holmes on numerous occasions. Cushing was actually a major, MAJOR fan of the original Conan Doyle stories; just as Eille Norwood did back in the silent era, every time Cushing handled the role of the Master Detective, he carried annotated copies of the stories with him for reference purposes. Cushing was as meticulous to detail in crafting the character as Holmes was when solving a case: if he disagreed with something in a script, he would either ask for permission to have it adjusted, or simply ad-lib and change things via his own judgment. Given his stardom and sense of refinement, scarcely anybody argued his creative choices: so much of what makes his Holmes great comes from the man himself. As I mentioned when I spoke of Douglas Wilmer, who played Holmes in the 1960s BBC TV series, Cushing took over from Wilmer when the show went into its second, full color season. Despite his high placement on this list, I must confess that – at least for THAT particular take on Holmes – I actually prefer Wilmer slightly more. Cushing’s Holmes – perhaps due to backlash to Wilmer’s more hardened portrayal – is a more playful and tender-hearted take on the character in that show. However, I do think he has much better chemistry with his Watson in that outing, Nigel Stock, than Wilmer did: the two bounce off each other beautifully and their friendship is genuine and warm, despite all the frustrations they occasionally cause each other. Cushing’s Holmes in this outing is by no means bad, but of the occasions he played the character, this is my least favorite. This may partially be due to the fact that Cushing had a hard time with the somewhat rigorous television schedule, claiming that he often felt he was struggling to remember his lines: perhaps that lack of temerity contributed to his performance. Of much greater success, in my mind, were Cushing’s two film-length takes on Holmes. One was “The Masks of Death,” which is another film that depicts an older Holmes and Watson – nearing retirement – attempting to solve a final case, this time involving an equally aged Irene Adler (played by Olga, Queen of the Cossacks herself, Anne Baxter). Originally, the film was just going to be a typical Holmes adventure, so to speak, but when the decision to cast Cushing was made – the man was already in his 70s at the time – the script and direction was changed, so that more emphasis was placed on Holmes’ age and mortality, and the way the world had shifted around both him and Watson by the time of this great caper. It’s a fascinating picture, and one that I often feel people don’t look into enough. Alongside Ian McKellen, Cushing brings to life perhaps the definitive “Old Holmes.” Cushing’s finest outing as Holmes, however, was undoubtedly his first…and, perhaps predictably, it was a Hammer production. Having handled such properties as Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy, Hammer decided to take a crack at Holmes with their own version of “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” Since Cushing was their biggest cash cow at the time, and since his love of the stories was known to several people involved in the production, he was given his first chance to play the Master Detective. If you’re going to watch only one Cushing Holmes outing, see THIS one: his Holmes in this movie is GLORIOUS. The character’s role is actually slightly expanded from the book (“Hound” is, in some ways, more a Watson story than a Holmes story, in the original book), and Cushing gets tons of time to relish the part. He’s energized and quick, shifting moods and approaches so fast it’s honestly hard to keep up at times. He’s theatrical and eccentric, but also calculating and logical. He can be curt and patronizing, but he can also be kind and sympathetic. He’s all over the place, while also being entirely in control: just the way Holmes should be. To me, Cushing’s take on the character in Hammer’s Hound is one of the most definitive…especially interesting, considering the many liberties that adaptation takes with the source material, but that’s another story. We’re about to enter the Top 3! Who will be next? Check in and find out!

[tiberelechat]

An attempt at summarizing Faction Paradox stuff #1

I have finished “The Book of the Enemy”, which was really quite good, so here’s my attempt at summing up all the short stories contained within.

The Annotated Autopsy of Agent A: JFK was an alien Cobweb and Ivory:   bloody dunno but there were mammoths The Book of the Enemy: Sherlock Holmes was killed by Conan Doyle T.memeticus - A Morphology: octopi are evil and want to kill you The Short Briefing Sergeant’s Tale: beware the tardigrades A Bloody (And Public) Domaine : Dracula is an evil meme Life-Cycle: corpse monsters and boat pillaging! First Draft:  X-Men except the mutants are stories Eyes:  The Fairie Queen meets Lovecraft We are the Enemy: Russell T. Davies killed Faction Paradox Timeshare: Californians are awful A Choice of Houses: reality TV will end up with you getting killed by peacocks Houses of Cards: watch out for six-people-human-eating-monsters The Enemy - The Hole in Everything: a guide to decapite yourself The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy: Rowling, Moore and Morrison vs. reality No Enemy But Despair: the psychological landscape of depression described with a lot of crack The Map and the Spider: spider vore

[icepixie]

I don't understand the criteria for making this list, but here are mine, with commentary. 51 total.

And yes, I am one of those people who actually read Ulysses, and in fact I enjoyed it tremendously. That said, I don't recommend reading it outside of a class. I took a Joyce class in grad school that was about three weeks of Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (one of my soul-defining books; I have written so many essays on it and images from it have made it unconsciously into my fic) and then the rest of the semester on Ulysses. As you might imagine, there are entire books devoted to annotating the novel (we used this one, if I remember correctly)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 4 Harry Potter series 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I mean, let's say 75%? Some of the less interesting histories I haven't bothered with.) 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 18 Catcher in the Rye - Salinger (I think you have to read this at exactly the right time in your adolescence, and I did.) 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger (Did not get the hype over this.) 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot (Eliot is the least Victorian Victorian writer you'll find. She started doing a lot of what the much more readable Modernists worked with in force, and her books aren't a slog the way, say, Dickens is.) 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh (This is amazing and you should read it if you haven't.) 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (Reading this in high school turned me off of Steinbeck, but then I read East of Eden after college and it turned me into a fan.) 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 34 Emma – Jane Austen (The SINGLE enjoyable Austen novel. The only damn one.) 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (Fuck me but I hated this book in college. HATED IT. Swoon somewhere else, Anne.) 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (I don't understand why this is here along with the entire Narnia series.) 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving (Partial credit--I think I got about halfway through.) 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (Everyone else loved it, but I couldn't get into it as a kid. Perhaps I should try again.) 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 52 Dune – Frank Herbert (Read this for a sci-fi course in college that counted for biology credit, it was awesome.) 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt (One of the very best novels out there. I wish her other books were half as good. I'll read pretty much anything that gets compared to this book.) 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy (The best of his novels, though as depressing as the rest of them. Again, it's less Victorian and edging toward Modernism, which as far as I'm concerned immediately improves things. I may be slightly biased.) 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce (See above) 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt (Another life-defining book. I read it once before grad school and once after, and they were very different experiences, let me tell you.) 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

How many have you read?

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

[eastorhild]

Ah crap, I most certainly did not mean that. I do understand in context how that metaphor went wrong, so I apologize for crude wording. I don't often delve into these discussions. I don't want you to feel that everyone hates you or that suddenly your Tumblr is full of antisemites, I can almost guarantee you it's not.

What I meant with the little bird tag is that it's childlish to just expect enormous amounts of free labour done for you.

This is what the OP wrote:

"...and that since it's only Jan. 6, Letters from Watson has an opportunity to make changes to its structure in order to address this (perhaps by incorporate minority commentary, critical analysis, and historical context into its publications?) before this thing really gets off the ground."

That is insanely labour-intensive! You guys are literally asking for the organizer to write a brand new, researched and annotated version of the Sherlock Holmes stories - for free. Properly done, it would take a months, if not years. It's not something someone just does at the last minute. Maybe you honestly thought it was easier.

I'm also not a fan of censoring problematic content out, because I'm not a fan of censorship in general. Read the dirt and call out the dirt. How else are we going to learn?

You said in another post that you were disappointed because you expected of Letters from Watson what happend with Dracula Daily, i.e. honest discussion and callouts of antisemitism, but... you do realise Matt Kirkland didn't deliver any of that analysis for us? (He also didn't rewrite Dracula for us.) The readers did everything. Same applies here. Interrogate the text, not the substack organizer.

I can't really help you with what you're going though, I can not rewrite the Sherlock Holmes stories, and I can't un-trigger you, but what I can do is edit the content warnings document, so I did. (Everyone can add to it.) I added: "Antisemitism: a character is described using derogatory language." It's not much and it won't help anyone who was already triggered, but maybe it will prepare anyone who is venturing in there late.

This is a bit long and I don't know if you have any patience to read this, but I tried.

Me, a Jew: I sure am excited to read Sherlock Holmes in it's original form

A Study In Scarlet Extract #2: "The same afternoon brought a grey-headed, seedy visitor, looking like a Jew pedlar..."

Me, a Jew: can't we just have one thing

Seriously though, apparently ACD had (at best) a very complicated relationship with Jews in real life, and presenting his work without so much as a mention of the harmful tropes perpetrated in Sherlock Holmes is pretty alienating to minority readers. I was really excited about the Letters from Watson thing since I'd never read Sherlock Holmes before, but seeing a publication from 2022 (which I'd argue this technically is) use the phrase "Jew peddler" completely uncritically was kind of a gut punch.

I'm not saying we shouldn't read Sherlock Holmes and I'm not saying Letters from Watson is a bad idea. But what I am saying is that presenting a massively popular work to a ready-made Tumblr fandom without any care or concern for the fact that the work has explicitly racist elements is irresponsible - and that since it's only Jan. 6, Letters from Watson has an opportunity to make changes to its structure in order to address this (perhaps by incorporate minority commentary, critical analysis, and historical context into its publications?) before this thing really gets off the ground.