I agree that Darin Morgan's episodes are the finest in the history of the series, but they're so tonally unique that they might not be the best place to start. After you've watched the pilot, my advice would be to begin with some of the very best self-contained casefiles: "Ice" (Season 1), "Pusher" (Season 3), and…

Also:

Favorite line that I'd forgotten: "I can't wait for the wake."

Death vs. Mortality
Reading the summary of "Humbug" reminds me of something that occurred to me over the weekend, after seeing Toy Story 3. Over the years, a fair number of Disney films have dealt with the subject of death, usually in stark dramatic terms—Bambi, The Lion King—but the Toy Story trilogy seems like the…

I like Wilson because he's one of the first writers since Montaigne to make a case for agnosticism as an active, engaged intellectual viewpoint, rather than as a kind of holding pattern for people too timid to be atheists. Wilson was a skeptic, but also one willing to grant the possibility that we might, in fact, be…

The other possibility, of course, is that Watson knew that Holmes was alive all along, and was deliberately misleading his readers.

Don't forget In Her Shoes and Lucky You (both of which are more worthwhile than commonly believed). Hanson's search for new material since L.A. Confidential has been fascinating: it hasn't always paid off, but there's something attractive about his refusal to be pigeonholed.

The best part about being a professor of symbology, apparently, is that Harvard students are fucking idiots.

I'd rather be a Professor of Symbology at Harvard.

Proust is amazing, although I've learned not to bring this up in casual conversation—it usually kills the discussion dead. Since you asked, though, I've always recommended that people start with "Place Names: The Place," which is the second half of Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of the novel. It's a…

It's true that Conan Doyle stole a lot from Poe, but those Dupin stories—while amazing from an historical perspective—are almost impossible to read these days. "Murders in the Rue Morgue," for instance, has a great premise completely swamped by a lot of unnecessary prose. Poe was a great innovator and inventor of…

Marge: There's a man here who says he can help you.
Homer: Is it Batman?
Marge: He's a scientist.
Homer: Batman's a scientist.
Marge: It's not Batman!

I saw Young Sherlock Holmes and Without a Clue when I was about ten years old, which is pretty much the perfect time to find them incredibly entertaining. Not sure how well they'd hold up now, though…

The Asylum trailer is pretty great, though:

I think that Conan Doyle intended for Watson to have married twice: first to Mary Morstan, then once more after Mary's death. With the various chronological confusions, though, most commentators think he must have had at least three wives, and some argue for many more.

I could tell you tales of cobbler's wax which would disgust you with human nature.

I agree that Robert Anton Wilson is basically a hamburger to Eco's fine steak, but he's a hell of a hamburger, with truffle fries on the side. In some ways, I think that Wilson understands how the world works on a deeper level than Eco does, although he hides it with his nonstop clowning (much like Pynchon, although…

Aside from the obvious choices (The Speckled Band, The Red-Headed League, Silver Blaze), here are some personal favorites: The Man With the Twisted Lip, The Beryl Coronet, The Devil's Foot, The Blue Carbuncle, The Musgrave Ritual. Also The Bruce-Partington Plans, but mostly because I love Mycroft.

Both The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum (which is my personal favorite) are great. Unfortunately, I read them at a very impressionable age, and as a result, my sense of fiction was skewed forever: when I began to write on my own, I wanted to create huge novels of dense philosophy and arcane ideas, without…

I feel like every used bookstore (at least in Chicago) has a copy of Baring-Gould somewhere on the shelves, and it's certainly widely available online. I should probably buy a new copy one of these days—my old edition is getting pretty beat up.