On the Omnibuses: May

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Original Illustrated Strand Sherlock Holmes

The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1903–04) ****

Unlike most weary franchise revivals, Holmes' reluctant resurrection is as good as the originals, meaning another mixed batch that starts out strong until the author exhausts the good ideas he's had in the interrim and starts to telegram it in before deciding to call it a day again, for real this time, definitely.

Reminisces of Sherlock Holmes (1908–13) ****

The series enters its prestige specials era. With just one story every year or so, there's more pressure to be worth the wait and most fare admirably, dabbling in macabre horror and dark comedy to keep things impressively varied after so long.

Homer, The Iliad and the Odyssey

The Iliad, Books I–II (~800 BC) *

I've never really been interested in getting the bloody preamble to the classic sea shanty, and even a quaint rhyming translation didn't make it much more palatable. It didn't help my motivation that my suspiciously cheap edition turned out to be a misprint with 48 missing pages in the middle, but I probably wouldn't ever have made it that far anyway.

Various, American Gothic: An Anthology 1787–1916

"Abraham Panther", An Account of a Beautiful Young Lady (1787) **

Grim New World survivalist folk tale.

Charles Brockden Brown, Somnambulism (1805) ***

A classic of unreliable narration, though you might need that pointing out if you started to nod off there.

Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle (1819) ****

A fun and endlessly-antholigible satirical time-travel fairy tale, but it's only here in place of the more obvious candidate to make some flimsy point.

John Neal, Idiosyncrasies (1843) **

Maybe this is how it feels to be drafted to the jury for the absolute worst.

George Lippard, From The Quaker City: or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1844) ***

Delightfully morbid reminiscence of a good, clean hanging.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Skeleton in Armor (1841) ****

If we'd done this morbid speculative archaeological poem at school, I might not have been put off the medium for decades.

James Fenimore Cooper, From The Prairie (1827) **

The sort of thing pop culture reviewers would compare gritty neowestern TV to if they were better read, or just cheating with a curated anthology.

Henry Clay Lewis, A Struggle for Life (1843) ****

Two sorry sods share an eventful night in the swamp.

Edgar Allan Poe, Five Poems: The Raven / The City in the Sea / Ulalume / Annabel Lee / Dream-Land (1844–49) *****

Insecurity saw me skip Poe's poems previously when going through the tall tales. I'll have to remedy that if this fine selection is representative of the whole and not just the haunting hits.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alice Doane's Appeal / Young Goodman Brown (1835) ****

Witch holocaust guilt and a presumably unintended celebration of the blasphemous melting pot.

Herman Melville, The Bell Tower (1855) ****

A clockwork Frankenstein in miniature, elevated by European pomp.

Alice Cary, The Wildermings (1852) ***

Gentle churchyard ambient.

Louisa May Alcott, Behind a Mask: or, A Woman's Power (1866) ***

The devious revelations just about justify reprinting the short novel in full, but I still would've rather spent those pages on assorted weird tales.

Harriet Prescott Spofford, The Amber Gods (1863) *

Self-absorbed horticultural gothic.

Emily Dickinson, Eight Poems (1858–77?) **

Popping our head into her attic room occasionally to find she's still going on and on. Your tea's getting cold.

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) *****

Too clever for me sometimes, but containing some of the best short stories in existence and I'm fully on board with the laid-back approach to summarising the best bits of books you can't be bothered to write.

Faves: 'The Library of Babel,' 'The Garden of Forking Paths.'

Artifices (1944) ****

More digestible inversions, efficient labyrinths and thought-provoking proofs of the power of literature, even when he's just making it up.

Faves: 'Death and the Compass,' 'The Secret Miracle.'

William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Songs of Innocence (1789) ***

I already read enough archaic nursery rhymes in the day job, but I thought these naive illustrated ditties might help me to get into the spirit of my first rural springtime since childhood. They're lacking without their grimmer counterparts, but those can wait until the harsh winter.

Alrightgames: The Clock Without a Face

The Clock Without a Face: A Gus Twintig Mystery

2010 / Armchair treasure hunt picture book / 1+ players / USA

*****

An upbeat alternative to Manson's Maze, the gimmicky extracurricular treasure hunt is a load of tedious bollocks (even if it hadn't been dug up within months of publication), but the more conventional domestic puzzles and quirky voyeuristic vistas earn it a place on the future rainy-day / pretending-the-internet's-broken list.

Alrightgames: The Ultimate Alphabet

Mike Wilks, The Ultimate Alphabet

1986 / Armchair treasure hunt picture book / 1+ players / USA

****

Nice enough as an excessively detailed surreal picture book to explore, the subjective alphabetical treasure hunt will hopefully prove a passable old-school rainy day activity in my grand scheme to mislead my daughter about what century she grew up in.

The mundane nostalgia of 500 Bus Stops

When I was 18, I thought nostalgia was remembering cartoons I watched a decade ago and escaping from insecure adolescence back to the sheltered innocence of an indoors childhood. I wasn't wrong, but there hadn't been enough time yet for those roots to grow to any meaningful depth. My less exciting adventures in the real world would turn out to have the more lasting impact.

Alrightreads: TV VI

Andy Lane, The Babylon File: The Definitive Unauthorised Guide to J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5

1997 / Ebook / 428 pages / UK

****

I took far too long to get around to this landmark series (after a couple of false starts over the decades), and making most of the journey in the company of the retro book I would have actually had at the time helped with the '90s immersion. As an unauthorised guide it's nicely opinionated, even if he's pretty crazy at times (such as calling the genuinely upsetting racial violence analogue "a fun and lightweight episode"), and free to be respectfully cheeky. Seeing the dots connected across the first 3.5 years helped get me through the rough patches.

J. Michael Straczynski, Peter David and Michael Collins, Babylon 5: In Valen's Name

1997-98 (collected 1998) / Ecomics / 80 pages / USA

**

The series gets a lot of praise for its plotting, but budget and other necessities mean that a lot of that happens out of sight and mind. Fortunately, there's authorised supplemental canon to patch some of those holes. Unfortunately, Minbari stories are pretty dull.

Scott Tipton, David Tipton and Greg Scott, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Too Long a Sacrifice

2020 / Ecomics / 96 pages / USA

***

Taking its cues and themes from a specific microgenre of episodes, this would have been a worthwhile addition and is one of the better DS9 comics, though it's mainly notable for its isolation as the only one of those in bloody ages.

James Van Hise, Kay Doty and Alex Burleson, Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Unauthorized Story

1993 / Ebook / 161 pages / USA

**

You wouldn't turn to this hasty half-season primer for authoritative insights, but as a combination of overly repetitive magazine and opinionated barely-retrospective, it makes a nice time capsule commemorating the first 'Trek spin-off. I especially enjoyed the candid dismay at the series seeming to abandon its promising premise for generic crap almost immediately. Just wait.

Tommy Donbavand, Doctor Who: Shroud of Sorrow

2013 / Audiobook / 256 pages / UK

**

I'd be tempted to single-mindedly obsess over the unwieldy franchise's 2010–13 ephemera if even its more promising novels weren't in the habit of tailing off unreadably as they go along. It wasn't worth my distracted attention after a while, but it started out well with a credibly cheesy horror plot, pop psychology analogy and subtle and less subtle anniversary nods. I should stick to the short stories.