Book of the Week

  I remember four years ago I saw, by chance, a book: Study in Scarlet. I had heard of Sherlock Holmes, superb detective, but had never ever read any book of Arthur Conan Doyle.  The book was very cheap, so it was the perfect time to meet Sherlock. I bought it, and I fell in love with Holmes.

  “It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact.''

  A Study in Scarlet was Sherlock Holmes' first outing into the literary world. Published in 1887 (after many rejections) it was an immediate success. Conan Doyle's quirky hero, with his cold deductive mind, violin playing and cocaine addiction, fascinated the reading public, and laid the foundation for the many Sherlock Holmes books and short stories that were to follow over the next three decades. In this first work, all the winning ingredient of a Holmes novel appear fully-formed: a murder, puzzling clues, evil villains, startling locations and an elegant, surprising solution provided in typical laconic style by the arch-sleuth himself.

I am his life as fully as he is mine

“I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest - blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character - perfect concord is the result.”

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Book of the Week

 I was sixteen when I read  Pride and Prejudice. It was the first Jane Austen novel I read and I fell completely in love with this author. Since then I've read everything she wrote.

"From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry."

 When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Mr Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Mr Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever.

From the Gaelic Alba

I will live in Scotland some day...