the last 6 or so hours of a 75-hour-long sherlock holmes marathon read by steven fry.
i bet i can say now, after more than three whole days of listening to this, that i have tried to like sherlock holmes, and there were, indeed, things that i did enjoy, but i just never will love sherlock holmes nearly as much as some of his peers (miss marple > sherlock holmes anytime).
i talked to my mother a few days ago about why i just prefer everything christie writes over conan doyle's sherlock (i even prefer her short stories over conan doyle's i think, even though i prefer her novels over her short stories and for his it's the other way around). every single sherlock holmes story just has such an infuriating male gaze, such incredible chivalry, everything about it is conformative and upholds the status quo. the riddles are sometimes nice, but never as interesting as christie's and i feel less compelled to guess who dunnit. the clues are laid with much less precision and the characters - i think that is the most important point. with conan doyle, it is always, always, always the women's characterization that falls short. there is barely any, anyhow, they are simply sorted in class and then good and bad, and once he describes in which of these four categories the current character falls, it might well be any other woman from the same category, with very few exceptions. all his female characters always faint and are either very dumb or very beautiful, sometimes both, often they are trapped in horrible marriages with sadistic men and everyone feels sorry but no one really does anything for them, and holmes and watson don't seem to feel that there should be any social change whatsoever. then there is the racism (in this installment, which is the last and was published in the 1920ies!! the n-word is used and the black character is a simple caricature, not improved at all by fry's ridiculous voicing which i really hated) and especially the general, gruesome colonial perspective and patriotism, and, last but all but least, the ableism: not only are all disabled people always called invalids, no, it is made very obvious that even a simple facial anomaly makes a person basically not worth anything but quiet suffering (because, as perultimate story teaches us, suicide is veryvery bad and can never be done, says i-am-o-so-rational mr christian moralist holmes) and disability is a central theme in many stories apparently for nothing but a misled horror factor and a kind of bystander curiosity satisfacton for readers who have too little road accidents and heartless victorian circuses in their lives.
all in all: not a fan, some of it is interesting and i think it taught me a lot about victorian morals and why i should stop reading books by white men