Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

There's a particular sensation of falling in love with a work of fiction. It's giddy. It hurts. I remember being a little kid in my attic room, reading as far as Frodo poisoned and lifeless in Shelob's lair, and crying myself to sleep. It wasn't until the next day that I realized, with Sam, that Frodo was still alive.  I wandered through my day at Piney Branch Elementary in a haze, just wanting to go back to my characters-- to Middle Earth, to Earthsea, to the Magic Kingdom (for Sale--SOLD!). My mom and I read The Lymond Chronicles together-- and we'd steal the books and get ahead of each other, and yell and weep about Lymond's self-sacrifice and brilliance, and Philippa's goodness and bravery. That world of 16th century high romance adventure overlay the dull and growing pain of real life. And we finished the last book together right before my mom died.  I reread them all again, in a fugue of escapism, love, and grief.  Harry Potter was the next thing to sn...

Anybody who has spoken to me in the last five years or so knows that I have a bit of a Sherlock Holmes obsession. I want to try and explain why these fictional characters are so important to me, especially in their incarnation by Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman on BBC Sherlock.  I first watched the show in about 2012, when the first two seasons are on Netflix. Matt had already watched it, and I had slept through it. He was in the habit of staying up all night with Netflix going while I slept. He watched it and he thought I should watch it. I was Luke warm. My only experience with  Sherlock Holmes  was Laurie King's wonderful feminist reimagining about Mary Russell. The rest of it seemed sort of, I dunno. Stodgy. Ridiculously masculine. But I agreed, and watched it all in one sitting more or less. As we often do now in this age of Netflix binge-watching, over two or three days I got to the end of the Reichenbach fall, the sixth episode and final episode. It ...