Pennyworth Books

There are still many more lessons that we can learn from Sherlock Holmes as we attempt to work in our jobs and professions and advance in them. You will find gems scattered throughout the pages of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels that can guide you to reach the heights..

Here is one:

Get acquainted with all fields of knowledge that have a bearing on your profession. You do not need to have all the facts at your finger tips but you need to know where to go in order to find them.

For example in the story of The Five Orange Pips when the client of Holmes came to him with his problem then it seemed to be a completely insoluble one. However Holmes knew what facts were relevant and also knew where to go in order to get them. By consulting some reference works he was able to get all the…

“The Tragedy of Macbeth” and “The Tragedy of Hamlet” are Shakespeare’s most widely read plays featuring royalty as main characters. Both are about the violent overthrow of the throne, both contain plenty of needless casualties, and both are gruesome enough to drive their leading ladies to suicide. (Kudos to Shakespeare for writing these cleverly enough that they weren’t banned by the English Crown, which was a tad sensitive in those days.) Superficial details aside, however, these two tales of treason couldn’t possibly be less alike.

“Macbeth” is the darkest and bloodiest of Shakespeare’s plays – which is saying something, considering that the guy had no shortage of tragedies in his repertoire. On the way home from a victorious battle, Macbeth hears a prophecy from three witches claiming that he will soon become king. Considering that he was just promoted to Thane and that King Duncan doesn’t have any heir at the…

Before you see the Disney film The Princess and the Frog, keep this in mind: everything you know about the fairy tale may be wrong.

You may know the story of the Frog Prince: a handsome young prince was innocently minding his own business when, for no apparent reason, an evil witch cursed him and turned him into a particularly ugly little frog. He was doomed to live in this miserable, lowly condition until a princess with a pure, loving heart saw past his ugly exterior and kissed him. Her purity and sweetness would break the evil spell and turn him back into a handsome prince-and the perfect boyfriend for the lucky princess. That’s how the story goes, right?

Wrong.

Pick up Grimm’s Fairy Tales and you’ll read an entirely different version. The true story of the Frog Prince is better still.

You see, the witch in the story wasn’t really evil at all. Her…

Everyman is a novel of Philip Roth. The title refers to a mediaeval play under the same name, in synopsis:

• here begins a treatise (tale) of how the high Father of Heaven sends Death to summon every creature to come and give account of their lives in this world, told in the form of a morality play. (wikipedia)

That gives some idea of the novel of Philip Roth. Beside death, another important ingredient of the story is disease. These two are sufficient to decide whether to read the book or not.

The key phrase of the novel appears somewhere at the end, when the hero re-contacted a few ex-colleagues by phone after years of silence to wish them luck. All, as himself, are suffering some kind of illness. He phones them in an action when looking back to his own life and trying to make-up some of the moral mistakes he had…

‘Dracula,’ one of the most famous novels ever written, had been produced as a movie in 1931. The movie in itself earned a lot of fame till Frankenstein eclipsed it. However, there are significant differences among the characters in the movie with the original novel.

The primary character Count Dracula remains the same. Bela Lugosi plays the role and does a great job.

Mina Murray of the novel become Mina Seward. And poor Dr. John Seward, the failed suitor of Lucy in the original novel, now becomes the father of Mina. And hey presto, Lucy still remains a friend of Mina.

Jonathan Harker, Mina’s fiance in the novel, remains the same in the movie.

Renefield of the movie is significantly different from Renefield of the novel. In the novel, Renefiled is merely another patient in Dr. Seward’s asylum. He eats and kills creepy creatures. And he beings Dracula inside the asylum of Dr. Seward…

The famous novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville has recently seen a translation activity fronted by Fred Benenson aiming to produce Emoji Dick, the world’s first (and perhaps last!) novel written in emoji.

What is emoji?
First a definition; emoji is not a language, it is the Japanese for picture characters, or in English, icons, sometimes animated, sometimes static. They have been standard on Japanese phones for many a year, then recently support has been introduced in Google Gmail and the Apple iPhone, although Apple have tried to surpress support for emoji in non-Japanese iPhones. One might think that there is a relationship between emoji and hieroglyphics, but as far as I understand hieroglyphics do codify a language and feature grammar elements, key features missing from Japanese emoji icons.

How is it being translated?
Emoji Dick is using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to muster multiple translators; each sentence will be translated into emoji three times,…

For most readers, “The Great Gatsby” is a story about mystery, intrigue, and deception. Even those big floating eyes on the book cover have an enigmatic, come-hither dreaminess. Gatsby is a mystifying figure who appears out of nowhere, buys a mansion, and embarks on what appears to be a crusade to get every person in a five-mile radius completely hammered. His inexplicable entrance into an uber posh area of New York City sparks a flurry of questions. Does he have a secret past? Has he assumed a false identity? Is the source of his income dubious? Does he have ulterior motives? Is that is his real hair?

Yup, pretty much. The mystery surrounding Gatsby evaporates pretty quickly once we realize that basically everything we suspect him of is true. In fact, the purpose of Gatsby’s mission is almost laughably single-minded: he wants to get the girl. Gatsby isn’t a complicated man:…