the once and future king

How on earth did I not discover this book before this year? What a masterpiece. Feels almost shockingly contemporary for a book that began to be published in the 1930s. Morally powerful, beautifully written, almost postmodern in its use of anachronisms and shifting authorial voice.

Goes straight onto the list of books I'll read to my future kids, along with His Dark Materials, Lord of the Rings, and the Earthsea novels. 

the memoirs of sherlock holmes

A lot of these are weirdly bad. There are a couple of classics but most of them are just Holmes telling Watson about something after the fact and narrating the whole thing from start to finish. Way too much expositions. It's almost like ACD was mailing them in, or kind of half fleshing them out and then calling it a day.