I got back from Readercon 22 about half an hour ago. Rather than attempt to write a con roundup which I always swear that I will do and rarely, if ever, actually get around to doing well, I will merely say that I enjoyed it: I got turned on to some new authors that I haven’t read before and I got to listen to smart people say smart things and to silly people say silly things (sometimes, of course, simultaneously).

I was stunned that the audience actually won the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition this year for the first time ever. I am looking forward to seeing how (if at all) they will deal with that fact in next year’s competition (as, usually, the winner is an on-stage contestant in the next iteration).

I have (as usual) a truly sickening pile of new books to read (only about half of which are really new-new) and I re-upped my subscription to Lady Churchill’s Rosebut Wristlet. (Can I pause for a moment to say how much I adore Small Beer press? I adore them SO FREAKING MUCH.)

The con was much fuller of things to do than my weekend was full of time in which to do them. Kind of like a microcosm of life itself, I guess. I am currently suffering from a mild case of what a friend of mine used to call PCBs – post con blues. The abrupt dissolution of the cheerful, focused intentional community that a con as small and specific as Readercon creates can leave one feeling a little bereft. But, of course, I will see folks again next year, if not before.

For now, there shall be rest, and laundry and a totally veggie-intensive dinner.

The first time I saw it, I approached the movie with caution, as it were. The trailer made it look like one of those re-tellings that throws the source material out of the window with total abandon and replaces story with action, explosions, etc.

Thus I went in with low expectations. It turns out I had theorized ahead of my data. I was pleasantly surprised. I remained pleasantly surprised on a second viewing. It wasn’t just my low expectations that made the movie seem good, it actually really was good.

While the action and explosions are definitely there (along with fistfights and some spectacular deaths) I was surprised at how true they stayed to the character of Sherlock Holmes and how much source material they actually used from the original stories to make this film.

There is a lot more action in the film than in the average story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which tend to be more about the mental feats than the physical. Doyle’s original Holmes was not averse to confronting the bad guys with his gun and his wits on occasion. Where the film portrayed Holmes as a far more physical being than he had been in the stories, it at least extrapolated his strong mental faculties and presented them as inexplicably intertwined with his physical prowess.

I don’t want to say too much else about the film, for fear of spoiling it for anyone, but I will say that the plot was engaging, the character interactions rang true to life and had plenty of humor and the depiction of turn-of-the-century industrial London was very effective.

By the way, if you, by chance, haven’t read the original Sherlock Holmes stories, I highly recommend it. There’s a reason that they’ve been adapted, parodied and re-envisioned in every medium available. The stories are available for free on Project Gutenberg, here. The stories are also out in very inexpensive editions, for those of us who can’t stand reading a whole book from a screen, and I guarantee they’re available at your local library.

The lens of history doesn’t leave the stories completely untouched. Women and romance are dealt with in a much less sophisticated manner in Doyle’s stories than they are in the recent movie and Watson gets a little breathless in his amazement, sometimes, but they’re still very engaging and Holmes is a Character in any decade. And, of course, the best part are the actual mysteries to solve.