signal boost: 60 for 60 to begin reading A Study in Scarlet
.... and after that the rest of the Sherlock Holmes canon. If you've wanted to read or reread Doyle's stories, this is a great way to get started. Of course you can join in anytime (I did), but it makes sense to start at the beginning if you can.
If you're unfamiliar, sherlock60 is one part book club, one part fanfic community. They take one short story (or in the case of longer works, one section of the novel) at a time. There's one week to read the story and then they post some discussion questions and people are encouraged to discuss it. Along side that, members of the community often write either a sixty-word ficlet (sixty words for the sixty stories in the Doyle canon) or a clerihew about the story being posted, and share it with the group.
You can of course just do the reading and discussion or the fic, or both, or (as I'm sadly just too obvious of proof) neither. It's really very low-key, low on drama in my experience with some really mature, insightful discussions of the canon stories and some creative Doyle-based ficlets.
By the way, all sixty stories are available free online. I'm a fan of the wiki-source versions (which the Sherlock60 gang links to), so if you don't mind reading off a website (and the formatting's really quite decent there), that option may work for you. Amazon also has a number of "complete works" books that are ridiculously inexpensive on the Kindle if you prefer readng ebooks to websites (the version I personally use).
ETA: vaysh mentioned that a good number of the stories are also available as audio through Librivox, for those of you who prefer to get your classic liberature through your ears rather than your eyes. No excuses! :-)
If you're unfamiliar, sherlock60 is one part book club, one part fanfic community. They take one short story (or in the case of longer works, one section of the novel) at a time. There's one week to read the story and then they post some discussion questions and people are encouraged to discuss it. Along side that, members of the community often write either a sixty-word ficlet (sixty words for the sixty stories in the Doyle canon) or a clerihew about the story being posted, and share it with the group.
You can of course just do the reading and discussion or the fic, or both, or (as I'm sadly just too obvious of proof) neither. It's really very low-key, low on drama in my experience with some really mature, insightful discussions of the canon stories and some creative Doyle-based ficlets.
By the way, all sixty stories are available free online. I'm a fan of the wiki-source versions (which the Sherlock60 gang links to), so if you don't mind reading off a website (and the formatting's really quite decent there), that option may work for you. Amazon also has a number of "complete works" books that are ridiculously inexpensive on the Kindle if you prefer readng ebooks to websites (the version I personally use).
ETA: vaysh mentioned that a good number of the stories are also available as audio through Librivox, for those of you who prefer to get your classic liberature through your ears rather than your eyes. No excuses! :-)