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Apocryphal
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This is my second Cherryh, the first being Pride of Chanur, which was also a Clash monthly pick. With Chanur, I sometimes had difficulty parsing Cherryh's writing, and I did here, too, though not as much. Was there enough setting? I'd say barely en…
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These are exactly as I expected them to be, and I’m not sure if this is basically me remembering an old read, or something else. I also very distinctly remember reading the account of the people throwing meat into the chasm of snakes in the Travels …
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No worries - we'll lay the foundation, you can vault back in when you have your footing again.
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Robin Hood was also doing it on behalf of the wider citizenry, and he targeted the corrupt who had enriched themselves. Dalila was acting for personal gain, and her specific victims were ordinary people mostly minding their own business.
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Fun section and a tidy end to the tale of Dalila. Many elements were not believable (less believable than Jinn in bottles?) but then each night Shahrazad says she’s going to tell ‘one stranger still’. You can’t keep making Jaws sequels without event…
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I really enjoyed these two sections. I think the comment about this being a inspiration for mystery novels comes from the fact that Wilkie Collins drew inspiration from the story, and he’s credited with writing the first mystery novel. But apart fro…
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I didn’t expect the Wilkie Collins link, either, but there you go. I recently listened to My Favorites, a collection of Ben Bova stories (which I thought lent themselves quite well to audio) and one of the stories is all about a group of storyteller…
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I was lucky to find a used one. It wasn’t on the shelf, but I asked the store owner if he had one, and he checked his inventory, went down to the basement, and voila.
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WOB is a UK company.We get referred to the UK site of WOB. For use, the prices are not cheap, and shipping not included. I liked The Book Depository much better, but they shut down about a year ago.
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I’ll start it tonight or tomorrow.
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Yes, it’s true that just because Babylon of 1800 BC and Baghdad of 800 AD share some characteristics, doesn’t mean one was a direct influence on the other. And it certainly other places could also have shared those. Nevertheless, it’s cool to see ec…
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This is largely the kind of story I remember from my original read through of the tales - lots of fortune reversal, come-uppance, and some juicy bits flapping around. And I’m wondering if there might be a difference between the Arab tales and Europe…
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Ah, ok then.
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I was just reading Wikipedia and it turns out that the story that starts with Witch World is incomplete - it is completed in the sequel, Web of the Witch World, which I did not previously know. We could (a) read both, given its over the holidays,…
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The Lost Author of Z
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So, I think we’re good with Cherry in November, Witch World in December, and have you made a final choice for January @NeilNjae ?
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I liked that part of the book, despite my experience in the genre, and thought it was fleeting, if anything. (Is ‘fleeting’ a nautical term turned to broader use, too?)
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> @RichardAbbott said: > I wondered if it would have been better presented in novel form rather than research summary for - sort of how Hilary Mantel writes about the Tudors. The same research would have been used, but maybe the point could h…
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I did it as an audio, so I even doubly missed them. I suppose there might have been a download package, but I didn't look. I thought the ending was fine, through I agree with you it was more denouement territory than the best part of the book. I did…
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Definitely Byron was the favourite, He's the central figure. I found him and his relationship to more famous Byrons to be pretty interesting, The only other character I gravitated to was Henry Cousins, and mainly because one of the other players in …
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I'm wondering to what degree 'good guy who got a raw deal' is really an American conceit, what with it's culture of renegade worship. Same for Australia, perhaps. It's much less a thing up here (and I presume in Britain). If you went to jail here, m…
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I should hope it's accurate - this is supposed to be non-fiction. I have no reason to believe it's not, and I'm not all that familiar with this particular time in the history of the Royal Navy. I think the purpose of most of the navy rules was to ke…
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I guess I do - I've read a bunch of them. Not because they're survival stories, and I'm not hunting for survival stories. I pick them because they're historical aventures, travelogues, or related fiction/non-fiction. Others like this I've read inclu…
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I took Neil’s question to ask whether the inside of the house was basically a type of faerie realm. Since Ars Magica was mentioned, in Ars Magica terms the inside of the house would be a ‘Regio’ - a kind of otherworld region that exists super-impose…
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(Quote) Difficult to say, really. Maybe this was just a common theme and this element existed in the story before it was ever collected into the Nights - in which case I guess the answer might 'none' if its presence is accidental. Or perhaps the was…
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I’ve never read any Norton, and I don’t hear her talked about much in my circles, so I’ve been curious. And at Christmas I usually like to recapture some of that sense of wonder that fantasy gave me as a kid. Contemporary books rarely do this; older…
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This one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_World_(novel)
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For December, I have a number of books I’ve set aside to read over the hols. One of those is Witch World, by Andre Norton. Would that appeal as a monthly pick? If not, I’ll suggest something else…
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(Quote) That's as good a reason as any. Maybe we should make more of an effort as club members to share interesting finds with each other - it can be hard to find good new books. (Quote) A Hugo winner might be a good book, but the fact that it won …
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@NeilNjae Just to be clear, I means books for me to avoid personally. And that’s because the Hugos are voted upon by the reading public, rather than selected by a panel of experts. And it seems like the reading public (or at least what publishers se…