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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,269
- 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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(Quote) And just developing this slightly (I thought about it a bit more while out doing grandparental duty during the school half term here)... The portion we read last week includes ten (I think) end-of-storytime-exchanges between Shahrazad and h…
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Re reading pace, I had a radical thought (which I haven't actually enacted) about reading in one evening only one portion according to how Shahrazad rationed the king! Of course that would mean some evenings reading hardly anything (and I don't know…
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(Quote) Yes, totally agree
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(Quote) I think there is a global fascination with these why questions - as well as "how did the leopard get his spots" type fables, there are all kinds of "why are there 7 stars in the Pleaides (with 6 brighter than the seventh)"…
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All: here's a monthly selection update! First, we are nearly at the end of October so looking forward to discussion on The Wager to be led by @Ray_Otus In November we then have Tripoint by CS Cherryh, to be led by @clash_bowley The schedule then …
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I have to confess that I am slightly getting lost in how many levels deep in the structure we are at any point! But that isn't affecting my enjoyment of the stories as we go along - there's more of a sense of surprised recognition along the lines of…
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A bit behind this week so will get to week 5 tomorrow (if you see what I mean) - but here's an additional thought on week 4 contributed by my other half. I was saying as how (unlike Disney Genie) the sealed bottled contained the disobedient and high…
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> @Apocryphal said:. > > (Quote) > Yes, I rather liked it. It was more like prose than poetry in any case, but it was used to speak to Allah, so in that sense it made an interesting tonal change between the mundane voice and the prof…
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I was thinking again overnight about the whole "source materials" thing, and suspect that with a long oral history of the tales (in whole or more likely in many parts) we are never going to get very close to listing out original sources. S…
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My thoughts from the intro notes: "Fernando Pessoa... musing... on the power of novelistic characters to acquire a presence stronger than that of friends or acquaintances in the real, visible world" This is something I could definitely re…
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(Quote) Yes! (Quote) Hmm, that's a curious difference from what is said here. I wonder if it's just that the Wiki editors themselves aren't aware of any such connection, or if Yasmine Seale is overstating the case?
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It was nice to see Jane Eyre popping up here! Maybe there was some serendipity involved in September's choice after all... But more seriously, I found it fascinating (and entirely credible) how many influential authors of the 19th century novel had…
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All: discussion on The Eyre Affair has dwindled (all in all, not a successful choice :) ) so it's time to turn to October's choice, The Wager, with discussion to be led by @Ray_Otus at the end of the month
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(Quote) A very interesting point - the king's strategy is ultimately self-defeating. But I think the point is that he has reached the point where he doesn't care about that... his supposed vengeance now directed against all women rather than just th…
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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