Kipling: Holmes: Swann: O.J. Simpson

    Just a few comments on what I have been reading recently. 
    On my I-Pad, and during my gym sessions, I have finished "Captains Courageous;" however, after what I saw as an amazingly constructed tale of life on a fishing boat, I felt the book tended to peter out when eventually the long fishing trip ended, the boat returned to port, Harvey's parents were informed of his survival and came by train from California, and we were treated to a rather long bonding scenario between father and son. And as for the chapter on the rail trip from California, which I had read was a "classic" of railway journeys--I thought it was one of the least intriguing or well-written chapters in the book. And another reservation was that Kipling, throughout the book, very much overdid the use of dialect and accents in the dialogue. Perhaps writing fashions have changed in this respect.
     Reverting to Sherlock, I finished "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb," which I thought was one of the sillier stories, and it involved no more of Sherlock's vaunted deductive skill than a guess that a twelve mile trip had been six miles out and six miles back, thus establishing the rough location of the house where the poor engineer had his thumb cut off. Really, a rather weak effort on the part of Conan Doyle. Let's see how the next one works--"The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor."
    I have finished the graphic version of Swann's Way, and once again I strongly recommend it as a beautiful book. The illustrations are superb, and the text--although obviously a fraction of the full version--provides the reader with the elements of the story. Indeed, after reading the condensed version and viewing the illustrations, I think I will dip into Proust a little...after all, haven't we all meant to do so some day, but never have?
    In 1996 Jeffrey Toobin published a book entitled "The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson." I read somewhere recently that this book is forming the basis for a new documentary on the O.J. Simpson trial, and so I got it from the Library. It is fascinating, and it leaves not a shred of doubt that O.J. did indeed kill his wife and Ron Goldman, and that he got off because the defense--Johnny Cochrane--unashamedly played the race card throughout the trial, essentially appealing to the African American women on the jury that the LAPD were out to 'get' O.J. Simpson. The only criticism I have is that we are treated to the life histories of all the major and minor players in considerable detail. However, in defense of Toobin, these potted biographies did say a great deal about the social history of the United States.
    And the third Elena Ferrante book is also proceeding...a little more slowly that the first two...