Nowadays it's almost impossible to imagine our life without books. Perhaps, there are more books on our planet than men alive. As for me, I'm really keen on reading detective stories. The masterpieces of this genre by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and others, show the depths of psychological analysis. Frankly speaking, one of my favourite books is The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Conan Doyle was born in the capital of Scotland, Edinburgh. After leaving school Conan Doyle became a student of the medical faculty at the university of Edinburgh. In 1887, he published his first detective story “A study in Scarlet”. Its main characters were Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and they became the most popular characters of a great many of Conan Doyle’s stories.

“A scandal in Bohemia” opened a collection of detective stories under the title “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”. The story was published in 1891 and soon after that Baker Street became the well-known address of Sherlock Holmes.

When he had written about twenty stories with Sherlock Holmes as the main detective, he was so tired of these stories that he decided to “kill” Sherlock Holmes. He wrote a story, which he named “Holmes’s last case”. But the readers did not wish to lose their favourite character and ten years later the famous detective appeared again. In 1901 one of Conan Doyle’s best stories “The hound of the Baskervilles” was published.

There is probably no one among book-lovers who has not heard of Sherlock Holmes, the skilful and clever detective.

I first discovered these stories when I was about 12 and I’ve loved them ever since. They’re brilliantly written and full of bizarre crimes. When you read them, you really feel like you’ve been carried back to nineteenth-century London . In my opinion, Holmes is unique – a genius with amazing mental powers. It goes without saying, that Sherlock Holmes’s method of analyzing the most difficult problems was to notice the smallest facts, even if they seemed unimportant. His method never failed.

Normally, I only read detective stories once. I mean, why read them again when you know what happens in the end? With the Sherlock Holmes stories, though, it's different. Each time I read them I discover more and more to enjoy.

As an old saying goes, man cannot live on bread alone. Books are the source of knowledge and the means of self — perfection. Sometimes it is difficult to solve some problems in life. I think that books can help us. Books must be our friends during all our life.

And in the end ;)