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Mark Gilroy January 23, 2014

My 5-Star Review for Cumberbatch and Sherlock

CBS has brought a contemporary Sherlock Holmes to America and added a whole new look (and gender) to Dr. Watson (played by Lucy Liu) in their hit show Elementary. I hear it is very good. I’m sure it is. But I have a problem with it even though I’ve never seen it.

It’s not the BBC’s rendition of Sherlock Holmes, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the world’s greatest detective, and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson. (Freeman starred as Bilbo Baggins in the second installment of The Hobbit, The Desolation of Smaug, and I kept waiting for him to help Gandalf solve a crime.)

Having read all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and novels as a kid, I love that the producers are steeped in the history and nuances of the Victorian Holmes. They have done a masterful job in bringing him to life in modern London while honoring Doyle’s original stories. It is obvious they are raving fans. And thank you to another fan, my daughter Lindsey, who introduced me to the BBC iteration.

Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is clever, quirky, humorous, dark, and intelligent in sufficient measure that fans (like my wife and I) put up with a second full-year hiatus as we waited for Season Three to arrive without abandoning ship. This is not normal TV viewing. The first two seasons had only three episodes each. It helps that each episode is ninety minutes long but I could still do with more.

Consider this my personal recommendation to watch Sherlock and watch Sherlock now. But don’t start with Season Three. It’s hard to find anyway. You have to hope you can find it on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater in those short interludes when they aren’t doing reruns of Downton Abbey. Or you can buy it by the season or episode on Amazon Prime or Vudu or another streaming service. Seasons One and Two are available for no cost on Netflix.

The other reason not to start watching with Season Three is how Season Two ended. So if you haven’t seen that, stop reading now, and consider this a spoiler alert.

Sherlock is so well done that we can (and do) forgive each long wait for new episodes … and for the pain and suffering the producers inflicted on us when Sherlock fell to his apparent death at the end of Season Two. His unforgettable return created a masterful interplay between Holmes and Watson as they painfully … awkwardly … hilariously reconnect. At the end of Season Three’s opening episode, “The Empty Hearse,” you realize “we” were Watson, and we too wondered why Sherlock let us think he was dead without a word for two long, painful years.

But the return was so satisfying that we, like Watson, have to forgive Sherlock. He’s just too fun to be around to stay mad at him forever.

In my humble opinion, Cumberbatch is the best Sherlock ever – and Sherlock is the best show on TV today. Well, at least for three episodes every other year.

Mark Gilroy November 26, 2012

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami – A Review

First things first. The title has nothing to do with IQ. The first character is the number 1 so the title is a play on George Orwell’s 1984. Just in case you were wondering if I selected the title because of a possible correlation in title and my intellect!

If you aren’t familiar with Japanese author Murakami, his novels are critically acclaimed – he has been awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and many others – and are a fantastical mix of surrealism and a rich (sometimes dense) detailing of everyday life. He consistently deals with themes of loneliness and alienation, the self and reality (and especially perception/imagination and reality). 1Q84 tackles all that and adds acute questions of the-ends-justify-the-means murder, religion and cults, destiny, sexual abuse, revenge, and parallel realities. Oh, it takes a while to catch on, but first and foremost, it is a love story. Really.

Was it listening to Janacek’s Sinfonietta that sent Aomame (“sweet pea”) into another world with two moons? Did Tengo see the same two moons when he rewrote Fuka-eri’s crude draft of Air Chrysalis? (And by the way, was that a story from the fevered imagination of a 17-year-old girl or was she describing things that actually happened?) Will either of them survive the revenge of a cult group called Sakigake and the brilliant and relentless pursuit of Ushikawa – a man with a large misshapen head that shouldn’t be able to follow anyone without being noticed? And what of the “Little People” – who seem to hold special powers in 1Q84 and that seem to be looking for a bridge to 1984 – are they neutral or as malevolent as we suspect? And the big question: did Aomame and Tengo have to enter 1Q84 to find each other after 20 excruciating years of separation from each other and disconnect from the world around them? I don’t think it’s a spoiler alert to say that they became soul mates at age 10.

Enough. You’re with me or not. If I’ve scared you off completely, don’t run away before reading the last sentence of this paragraph. If you’ve read other reviews I’ve written what you might have already discovered is I don’t actually review books – I recommend books. Sometimes quite different books. I know Murakami is not for everyone – though 1Q84 sold a million copies in Japan alone – and I’ll have to admit, it’s not my usual fare. But I recommend this book for its dense, other-worldly beauty – reading it creates that curious sensation of wanting (even needing and willing) it to be done and to never end.

The original Japanese version was published in 2010 and the English translation was introduced in 2011. I read the lovely boxed set (very reasonably priced on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and others) that was given to me as a gift by my son Merrick.

Mark Gilroy July 8, 2011

Sales Continue to Drop for Print Books

Publisher’s Weekly just reported:

The total unit sales of print books sold through the outlets whose sales are captured by Nielsen BookScan dropped 10.2% in the six month period ended July 3, falling to 307.1 million. Among categories, the biggest decline came in adult fiction with units off 25.7%, while mass market paperback had the steepest decline among formats with units down 26.6% in the period. BookScan totals cover about 75% of the outlets where print books are sold.

Is this yet another signal that the book is dead or should at least be placed on the endangered species list?

As someone who makes a living in the book publishing industry I continue to maintain an optimistic position on the future of the book, in part, because I don’t define the book as a physical object.

I see no reason for hand wringing. Publishers need to keep their focus on what they can control and what matters most: great content. The distribution medium matters but is not paramount. The music industry fought Napster (rightfully) and electronic distribution (wrongly) for most of a decade – and lost control of its own packaging and pricing. I think the book publishing industry has maintained a much healthier point of view toward electronic formats from day one.

I like physical books – actually, love is the better word for it – but I’m not going to lose sleep if we sell more books as electronic editions and kill fewer trees in the process. One of the biggest benefits of selling e-books for publishers is fewer dollars tied up in paper and ink with all the inventory management issues surrounding that. The amount of time it takes to recoup a dollar of the investment that goes into publishing a book is long enough without making the irreversible commitment to a print quantity that may not dovetail with real demand.

Of course many publishers have long built financial models around a certain percentage of their unit sales coming from higher priced hard cover releases. As e-books continue to eat into the number of hardcovers sold, particularly with adult fiction, it changes the proforma dramatically, so I’m not saying this change makes things easier in all ways. Change is hard.

I’m strictly describing what I think is – not proscribing what should be. And no matter how strong Amazon is as a bookseller, I still hope the market will support a robust brick and mortar retail environment. (Borders might not agree that is possible – but we should know if their reorganization is Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 within days – or even hours.)

My personal prediction – more gut than numbers at this point – is that five years from now 35-40% of all books sold will be e-books (digitally distributed), which would mean the majority of books consumed would still be on the ink and paper medium. I also think that projection would leave space for a strong brick and mortar presence for at least Barnes and Noble and some exceptional independents that incorporate an e-book strategy into their overall sales mix.

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” said Mark Twain after hearing his obituary had been printed in the New York Journal.

The same can be said by and of the book.