| Name | David Loftus |
| Title | Top (six star) Scholar
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| Total Reviews |
592 |
| 1. Favorite book and why? |
Since just about all the reviews are about Holmes and I must confess I've never read any other Doyle, I will say that my favorite stories are "Silver Blaze," "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," and "The Man With the Twisted Lip." Perhaps I'm getting mellow in my middle age, but I prefer tales with a bit of charm and humor to those involving murder.
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| 2. Least favorite book and why? |
"The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" is pretty weak. I'm not all that fond of _A Study in Scarlet_, either, because it has so much background narrative rather than Holmes-Watson dialogue and action, and I'm not all that enamored of the anti-Mormon thread in that tale.
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| 3. Favorite scene in favorite book and why? |
Either the poor man going nuts about his lost goose in "Blue Carbuncle," the theatrical exposure of Mr. Neville St. Clair in "Twisted Lip," or the unmasking of the murderer in "Silver Blaze." They are all hair-raisingly dramatic scenes.
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| 4. Favorite character and why? |
Sherlock Holmes, of course. Who else?
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| 5. Which character do you identify most with and why? |
Dr. Watson. We see almost everything through his eyes, and Doyle purposely makes us partners with him in admiration of and surprise by his companion.
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| 6. If you could see a sequel to one of the author's books, which would it
be and what would it be about? |
As Davice Sharp has pointed out, there have been hundreds, maybe even thousands, of "sequels" written by dozens of followers of Doyle and Holmes. The Nicholas Meyers are good, and despite Charles Prepolec's demurral, I found Robert Lee Hall's very tricky Holmes-and-the-Ripper story, _Exit Sherlock Holmes_, rather charming. Also recommended is Julian Symons's _A Three-Pipe Problem_, featuring a modern-day TV actor who plays Holmes and decides to apply his methods to a baffling series of murders. Someday perhaps I'll write one too.
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| 7. What do you like about author's writing style? |
Wonderful evocation of time and place ... two unforgettable protagonists and a delightful gallery of minor characters ... some baffling mysteries ... sparkling Victorian dialogue....
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| 8. What are your favorite themes of this author? |
Honor and precision ... getting the details down cold ... exacting justice, no matter where the law might come down (Holmes commits a number of felonies and overlooks several committed by others).
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| 9. What could be most improved about this authors books? |
Nothing, if you can obtain W.S. Baring-Gould's _The Annotated Sherlock Holmes_, which will fill in all the blanks and explain all the words, concepts, and other details from a century ago that you will not know.
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| Something about yourself |
I do a dynamite oral imitation of Holmes and Watson, and have been recording some of the best stories for "Golden Hours," a broadcast service for blind and elderly housebound listeners in Oregon that is overseen by the public radio station KOPB in Portland.
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Book Reviews
Click on a book below to see my review of it. |
Study in Scarlet
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
The Annotated Sherlock Holmes
A Scandal in Bohemia
The Reigate Squires
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Other Authors
whose books I've reviewed |
Biography
Noah Adams
Deirdre Bair
The Beatles
Jack Benny and Joan Benny
Herbert Bix
Ray Bradbury
Edna Buchanan
Anthony Burgess
Helen Caldicott
Simon Callow
Robert Caro
Miranda Carter
Wensley Clarkson
Edward Conlon
Peter Cowie
Rosemary Daniell
Ariel Dorfman
Timothy Egan
Harlan Ellison
Anne Fadiman
Jeannette Ferrary
M.F.K. Fisher
Delores French
Stephen Fry
Stuart Galbraith
John Gielgud
Martin Goldsmith
Philip Gourevitch
Sebastian Haffner
E.M. Halliday
Joseph Heller
Robin Marantz Henig
Lee Hill
Laura Hillenbrand
Walter Isaacson
Roy Jenkins
Jane Juska
Mary Karr
Florence King
Stephen King
Klaus Kinski
Jeffrey Kluger
Wayne Koestenbaum
Bernard Lefkowitz
Warren Lehrer
Primo Levi
Lauri Lewin
Mitzi Loftus
Anthony Loyd
Adeline Yen Mah
George Martin
Katherine Martin
Frank McCourt
Louis Menand
Daphne Merkin
Azar Nafisi
Pamela Nagami
Donald Newlove
David Niven
Sherwin Nuland
Richard Parker
M. Scott Peck
Geoffrey Perret
George Perry
Kevin Phillips
Jonathan Raban
Donald Rayfield
Kay Jamison Redfield
Kim Rich
William L. Riordan
Ron Rosenbaum
Richard Rubin
Jean-Paul Sartre
Dan Savage
Stacy Schiff
Clea Simon
Brenda Venus with Gerald Seth Sindell
John Southworth
Chris Stewart
Lee Strasberg
Wendy Swallow
Anthony Swofford
Frank Vertosick
Christine Wallace
Eileen Warburton
Amy Fisher with Sheila Weller
Sam Weller
Miriam Williams
Tobias Wolff
Christopher Wren
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Howard Zinn
History (in beta)
Stephen Ambrose
Rick Atkinson
Max Boot
H.W. Brand
Geraldine Brooks
Thomas Cahill
Iris Chang
Frank Chin
Rich Cohen
Stephanie Coontz
Andrew Spielman and Michael D'Antonio
Norman Davies
Nancy Yaw Davis
Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, Annette Lawrence Drew
Bruce Feiler
Paul Fussell
Paul Boller and John George
Philip Gourevitch
Yossi Klein Halevi
Aidan Hartley
Chris Hedges
Paul Hendrickson
Gregg Herken
Tony Horwitz
Phillip Knightley
William Kornblum
Kevin Krajick
Robert Kurson
Frederick S. Lane
Raymond B. Lech
Primo Levi
David Loftus
Thomas P. Lowry
Alberto Manguel
Bill McKibben
Michael Moore
James Oberg
Susan Orlean
Kenneth Pollack
Michael Pollan
Diana Preston
Robert D. Putnam
Simon Schama
Doug Stanton
Ronald Takaki
Dom Felice Vaggioli
Garry Wills
Bob Woodward
Literature
James Agee
Henri Alain-Fournier
Roberto Athayde
J.G. Ballard
Russell Banks
Samuel Beckett
Saul Bellow
Alain de Botton
Ray Bradbury
Suzanne Broegger
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
Geraldine Brooks
Bill Bryson
Charles Bukowski
Mikhail Bulgakov
Robert Olen Butler
A.S. Byatt
Italo Calvino
Louis Ferdinand Celine
Miguel de Cervantes
Michael Chabon
Andrei Codrescu
Robert Cormier
Quentin Crisp
Achmat Dangor
Don DeLillo
David Denby
Charles Dickens
Ugo DiFonte
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
David James Duncan
Marguerite Duras
Andrea Dworkin
Geoff Dyer
Bret Easton Ellis
Harlan Ellison
Jeffrey Eugenides
Anne Fadiman
William Faulkner
M.F.K. Fisher
Gustave Flaubert
John Fowles
Jonathan Franzen
Robert Fulghum
Jostein Gaarder
Ernest J. Gaines
Paul Gallico
Peter George
Herbert Gold
John Gould
Germaine Greer
Roger Grenier
David Guterson
Robert Harris
Joseph Heller
Naomi Hirahara
A.M. Homes
Khaled Hosseini
Richard Hughes
James Joyce
Merrily Weisbord and Kim Kachanoff
Garrison Keillor
Gerald Kersh
Florence King
Milan Kundera
Alexander Kuprin
Andrey Kurkov
D.H. Lawrence
Jonathan Lethem
Mario Vargas Llosa
Anita Loos
Barry Lopez
Naguib Mahfouz
Norman Mailer
Thomas Mallon
Sandor Marai
Yann Martel
Peter Matthiessen
Frances Mayes
Peter Mayle
Ian McEwan
Todd McEwen
Herman Melville
George Meredith
Rohinton Mistry
Nicole Mones
Lorrie Moore
Haruki Murakami
Iris Murdoch
Vladimir Nabokov
Sena Jeter Naslund
Edith Nesbit
Sherwin Nuland
Patrick O'Brian
Tim O'Brien
John O'Hara
Chuck Palahniuk
Charles Palliser
C.D. Payne
Edgar Allan Poe
Richard Powers
Frederic Prokosch
Philip Pullman
Daniel Quinn
Edeet Ravel
Philip Roth
Jean-Paul Sartre
Bernhard Schlink
Peter Shaffer
William Shakespeare
Ronald B. Shwartz
Josef Skvorecky
Alexander McCall Smith
Rebecca Solnit
Terry Southern
Wallace Stegner
John Steinbeck
George Steiner
Stendhal
Neal Stephenson
Italo Svevo
Junichiro Tanizaki
Leo Tolstoy
John Kennedy Toole
Mark Twain
William Vollmann
Robert Penn Warren
Nathanael West
Colson Whitehead
Elie Wiesel
Leon Wieseltier
Tennessee Williams
Anderzej Zaniewski
Emile Zola
Science Fiction
Isaac Asimov
Margaret Atwood
J.G. Ballard
Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes
L. Frank Baum
Greg Bear
Alfred Bester
Ben Bova
Ray Bradbury
Lewis Carroll
Arthur C. Clarke
Susan Cooper
Robert Cormier
Philip K. Dick
Harlan Ellison
Carol Emshwiller
Jack Finney
Neil Gaiman
David Gerrold
William Gibson
Keith Hartman
Robert A. Heinlein
John Hersey
Franz Kafka
Philip Kerr
Ursula K. LeGuin
Gregory Maguire
Richard Matheson
Walter Miller Jr.
Perry Miyake
Edith Nesbit
Terry Pratchett
Philip Pullman
J.K. Rowling
Mary Doria Russell
Robert Sheckley
Norman Spinrad
Neal Stephenson
Theodore Sturgeon
Ruth Plumly Thompson
Kurt Vonnegut
H.G. Wells
Thriller/Action
Peter Blauner
Steven Bochco
Raymond Chandler
Laura Childs
Agatha Christie
Robert Cormier
Colin Dexter
Michael Dibdin
Stanley Ellin
James Ellroy
Elizabeth George
William Goldman
Dashiell Hammett
George V. Higgins
Philip Kerr
Gerald Kersh
Laurie R. King
John Le Carre
Donna Leon
Richard Matheson
Iain Pears
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Elizabeth Peters
Dorothy L. Sayers
Michael Shaara
Robert Stone
Lono Waiwaiole
Donald Westlake
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