A review by mcbethjb
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle

4.0

How can you not say you like Sherlock Holmes? Annotated by a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, this tome was bound to be informative and strange at the same time. One of the things that came to the forefront to me repeatedly on this read-through was how strangely different life was just 100 years ago. It is easy to delude ourselves into believing that we can understand people of the Victorian age (it certainly is a popular time for people to talk about / emulate), but their attitudes on justice, and labor, and country, and race, and religion, and gender are foreign to our modern discourse. The footnotes are largely interesting and about evenly split between information a modern reader could use to understand the story better and ways people have attempted to maintain the great fiction that "the Canon" is all real.