Myra here.

Every Saturday we hope to share with you our thoughts on reading and books. We thought that it would be good practice to reflect on our reading lives and our thoughts about reading in general. While on occasion, we would feature a few books in keeping with this, there would be a few posts where we will just write about our thoughts on read-alouds, libraries, reading journals, upcoming literary conferences, books that we are excited about, and just book love miscellany in general.

Sherlock Holmes is one of the long-standing literary detectives that has stood the test of time, evidenced by its various spin-offs through million-dollar Hollywood films and an immensely popular TV series (which, admittedly, I do not enjoy watching as much as my fellow geeks are enthused by it). And so it is with a measure of glee that I chanced upon these various Sherlock Holmes adaptations in our public library.

Sherlock Holmes In The Hound Of The Baskervilles: A Sounds Primer

Author: Jennifer Adams
Art: Alison Oliver
Publisher: Gibbs Smith, 2013
Book borrowed from the Jurong West Public Library. Book photos taken by me.

This is my first BabyLit book and I am absolutely taken by it. I have seen a few of the BabyLit titles being shared by fellow book enthusiasts but I haven’t really chanced upon them yet. It’s very rare that we review board books here in GatheringBooks – something that we need to remedy very soon – and I am glad that our first one has to do with sleuthing and investigating.

As can be seen above, the left hand page features a noun and the right-hand page features their sounds. However, unlike other infantilizing books that seem too scared to stretch a young baby’s imagination, this one features not-so-ordinary-babyish-kind-of-words:

I enjoyed how this sounds primer has that sinister theme, inviting bright-eyed babies to pay attention to the world around them; and this awakening of the senses is what makes for a first-rate detective.

Definitely a book that parents of young babies should check out.

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I confess that I haven’t really had a chance to read these graphic novel adaptations, but I thought of still sharing them here, in the event that it might interest our younger readers. I believe there are several titles available from Graphic Planet – condensed versions of the very intricately-plotted Sherlock Holmes stories.

I was not particularly taken by the design and layout which appeared way too cluttered for me, so I ended up returning these titles to our library. However, they could serve as good introduction to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters and cases.

Have you read any of these books yet, fellow readers? How did you find them?