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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,070
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member, Administrator, Moderator
- Games I like
- Sundry, mostly board
- Books I like
- Science fiction, fantasy, some historical fiction
Comments
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re the vizier's stories, I was also reminded of CS Lewis's The Horse and his Boy where Calormene (as a stand-in for Arabic nations) has its own story-telling traditions. Shasta's adopted father attempts to tell stories in this tradition but they com…
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The thing I made a mental note of and highlighted to boot in the intro section was the influence on the Romantics - this seems (from the supporting evidence) to be pretty well established, but I had not expected it. I guess I should - the stories ar…
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That would be a remarkable piece of intertextuality :)
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(Quote) That's an interesting point, especially given that this was Fforde's debut novel. Did he simply try to put too much into it?
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Of course I then had to look up Glorantha which threatened to become a huge rabbithole, but seems to me very like the sort of thing that Fforde might be into. Was "Flora" an auto-correct for Glorantha, or is it a thing in its own right? (Q…
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(Quote) I assumed that it was a combination of two things: 1) in English idiom, "Thursday next" is equivalent to "next Thursday", the idiom only (so far as I know) being used for days of the week or months of the year. So one mig…
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All: apologies for the slight delay but some discussion starters for The Eyre Affair are now posted.
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(Quote) Yes indeed (Quote) I also don't know about the (comparatively late by my normal standards) time periods of what we are reading. But there are some indications that back around 2000BCE or thereabouts some Mesopotamian cultures practiced matr…
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(Quote) There are two places in England that come to mind - the Isle of Ely and the Isle of Purbeck. Ely, a bit north of Cambridge, was historically mostly surrounded by fenland and so you needed local knowledge to approach safely (long since draine…
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(Quote) That's fair. I guess even today we like ongoing stories with episodic clliffhanger endings - pretty much every streamed series follows this pattern.
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(Quote) Hm, that's an astute observation! I had assumed that he was included amongst the other slaves when Shahriyar "stormed every room of his palace", but on the other hand Masud is said to have "leapt over the [palace] wall and wen…
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(Quote) Judging by the comparison to The Handmaid's Tale this happy ending was probably a later accretion! (Quote) Indeed (Quote) Robin Hood is definitely a later set of stories with its deliberate ties to the reigns of Kings Richard and John. The…
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I made a few other notes as I went along. From the intro "Arabian Nights possesses a remarkable ability to mutate in the hands of the innumerable storytellers... who have reimagined it,,, The inherent fluidity of the collection seems to invite…
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Just checking how close people are to finishing The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. Not that I'm planning posting anything before the weekend but just finding out
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Great to have you back @Ray_Otus - let's hope your own sea voyage isn't as eventful as the one I am expecting in The Wager :)
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All: I have set up the new slow read discussion category for The Arabian Nights and moved the discussion @NeilNjae started with the link to the Google Doc plan into it
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Moved to new slow read category by Richard
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Sounds great to me [Edited} would you like me to set up a discussion area in the Slow Reads category?
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Also October area for The Wager (led by @Ray_Otus ) and November area for Tripoint ( @clash_bowley ) now set up
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Some thoughts about this, finally. Come Looking for Me, being a historical novel, has a certain set of historical events around and within which to establish a particular plot. Clearly different historical novelists stick to known (or at least broa…
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Sounds good to me
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(Quote) That was sort-of my thinking. Physical formations are invaluable - a wedge is good against a line, a square is good against cavalry, missile troops are better deployed behind melee troops and so on. EE (Doc) Smith was heavily into this with …
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That's really neatly put, @Apocryphal
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I lack much of the relevant experience to answer this properly, but yes, it felt like you just had to have the right magical device (=weapon with funky name) and you'd either annihilate your enemy or be annihilated next turn - kind of Russian Roulet…
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This European failed to understand it, I'm afraid. And I came away with no clear idea what the key themes were or what the book was trying to say
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Hm, an interesting idea which hadn't occurred to me before. I'll have a think about it.
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Yes, Cheris was quite interesting but was progressively eclipsed. But I was neither sorry nor pleased that she vanished. Formation instinct (and I guess part of me baulked at the word instinct when it was apparently actually a culturally imposed be…
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Yes, again I agree with @clash_bowley - in most chapters a new utterly destructive weapon was wheeled out, and there wasn't (I think) any attempt to have a consistent body of military or physical theory behind any of them - they all seemed to target…
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I almost gave up about half way through because of my complete lack of understanding of what was happening and who I was supposed to think of as worth favouring, but persuaded myself to finish it. The ending kind of confirmed my feeling that we were…
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Yeah, I never really got it at all, even after @BarnerCobblewood sent me those links. If I had found the story in itself interesting I might have put in the effort to learn what was going on, but I didn't, so I didn't (if you see what I mean). A lot…