July Read-a-Thon Update: Day 8

Wow—what a trip! I spent all day yesterday at the Make Progress National Summit (I’m planning write-ups about the panels I attended), and then visited the White House today for a group meeting with the associate director of public engagement. The meeting was about priority issues that millennials are interested in, and he kindly took questions from us all for an hour.

Now, I’m at the airport, waiting for my flight back home. I’m excited for all the plane reading I’ll get to do, and to be back home and get some writing done. I didn’t get much  reading or writing done while here, sad to say, but I had a great experience nonetheless.

Pages read so far:

• 61 pages from Detection by Gaslight: 14 Victorian Detective Stories by Douglas Greene [Ed.]. Notes: no update.
• 26 pages from On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz. Notes: no update.
• 150 pages of A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Notes: now finished. Didn’t get it done by Sunday night, because I had school work to do and packing to finish and writing to get through. Still, it’s done now, and quite as good as I remember it being.
• 141 pages of The Sign of the Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Notes: aaaannd finished. There’s definitely some racism indicative of the time, and I made awkward faces a couple times, but still a good read. And the end references the beginning in an amusing way.
• 21 pages of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Notes: it’s interesting to observe what pieces of the original stories were preserved in the recent BBC adaptation, and what parts were cut for time and modernity’s sake. Also, obviously, to have an overarching villain, they’ve shuffled things around and expanded the role of Moriarty in the show. I rather prefer the books/stories in this respect, though I have always preferred faithfulness in adaptation to a large degree—which is why, I suppose, I’m not a screenwriter. (An exception can be made for re-imaginings, in my view, but not change for change’s sake alone, which is what I sometimes feel Like Moffat has done. But he’s show-runner, not I, so…)

Boarding begins soon, and then I’ll have a long stretch of sitting before me. Have a good day, all!

Running page count: 399