#pubcrawler

1. PubCrawler is an online service that checks for new scientific publications every day. Basically, you give it your email address and tell it what combinations of keywords you’re interested in. If anything is published on PubMed or GenBank with those keywords, you get a notification by email. It’s extremely simple to use and to fine-tune, and it’s just so handy! Yet very few people seem to know about it. (Gmail tends to think the emails look dodgy, but that’s just because PubCrawler is a very simple not-for-profit automated service set up by a group of academics in Dublin.)

2. The Horatio Lyle books by Catherine Webb

I adored these when I was about 14. A series of four books aimed at young teenagers. 

Horatio Lyle is a Victorian scientist-inventor-detective who does NOT believe in magic, which is unfortunate because evil people with magic powers are trying to take over the world. He accidentally sort-of-adopts two children: a “reformed” (oh yeah?) pickpocket named Tess, and the refined and repressed son of an earl, Thomas. This trio has to save the day using science (mostly of the explosive sort). There are cameo appearances from real-life Victorians.

OK, they’re a bit madcap. The plots are unbelievable and sometimes a little hard to follow. BUT. The writing is astonishing. It’s very funny, but also amazingly poetic at times, especially in the second (and best) book, The Obsidian Dagger. The descriptive passages have a Dylan Thomas feel and they read like a love-letter to the London of 1864.

3. Litolff’s Scherzo

Now I’m not a connoisseur of classical music, but this piece belongs with those other famous pieces that everyone just knows, even if they don’t know the name of them. But hardly anybody knows of this one, and I’ve never even heard it in an ad!

It’s basically a one-hit wonder from the 19th century. It’s the most liquid and upbeat piano piece EVER. It’s as if you took a sunlit stream babbling through a sunny meadow, and distilled it into music. It’s how you feel when you’re inspired. Give it a listen. My favourite version is here.

4. The Sheffield Banker, a.k.a. The Case of the Man who was Wanted

This Sherlock Holmes story was found among Conan Doyle’s documents after his death and was at first thought to be an unpublished story by Doyle himself. It then turned out to be the work of a man called Arthur Whitaker, who had sent it to Doyle with the view of a collaboration.

I came across it in The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [Penguin Books]. If you read up on it, everyone dismisses it as a mediocre pastiche that doesn’t live up to the canon.

Well, I consider it canon. It’s more enjoyable than several of ACD’s stories. In fact, it has the best Holmes-Lestrade interactions of any SH story I’ve read.

Lestrade starts off as self-assured as usual:

Lestrade gave me a wink for which I would dearly have liked to have knocked him down, for I could see that he disbelieved my friend.

but of course he winds up baffled. There is a delightful moment when he shows up at 221B and explains that the man he was supposed to capture seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Lestrade’s face [...] bore a look of the most hopeless bewilderment I ever saw, and I fancy my own must have pretty well matched it, but Holmes threw himself back in his easy chair, with his long thin legs stuck straight out in front of him, his whole frame literally shaking with silent laughter. "What conclusion have you come to?" he gasped at length. "What steps do you propose to take next?"

"I've no idea. Who could know what to do? The whole thing is impossible, perfectly impossible; it's an insoluble mystery. I came to you to see if you could, by any chance, suggest some entirely fresh line of inquiry upon which I might begin to work."

"Well," said Holmes, cocking his eye mischievously at the bewildered Lestrade, "I can give you Booth's present address, if it will be of any use to you?"

"His what!" cried Lestrade.

And then of course Holmes solves the case, and there is a heart-warming moment:

Lestrade rose. "Mr. Holmes, you're a brick," he said, with more real feeling than I have ever seen him show before.

The whole story is Holmes at his sassiest and snarkiest. I mean what more could you want? It’s available online here.

5. And All is Said, by ivory_leigh

This is the most underrated Star Trek fic that I’m aware of. It only has a kudos of 83 on AO3, and yet it manages to summarise the whole mcspirk relationship... in just 434 words!