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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,165
- 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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I just looked up the Wiki article about the rukh (or roc in more Anglicised versions) and a reference there reminded me of the Eagles of Middle Earth - for some weird reason I had not made that connection.
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Well, another very enjoyable section, when I could indulge myself and listen to Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade suite of music (based very loosely on the Sinbad cycle but should probably be described as "inspired by" rather than "follo…
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Yes I was thinking similar things by way of contrast to (for example) Robin Hood - both tales have the themes of the roguish person whose acts are illegal, but where the law-enforcement teams are universally seen to be corrupt and self-serving, henc…
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Again a good section, though as you say the constant upping of the stakes and improbability of the sequence caught up with me (as I'm sure it was meant to - surely no listener or reader, ancient or modern, would be expected to just swallow it all?).…
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(Quote) Kind of like Ocean's Eleven :) And I agree it was fun
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(Quote) Oh yes, totally! There's no grand master plan to accomplish the end-goal, just a series of opportunistic seize-the-moment actions based on chance encounters. It has the feel of something that could be endlessly added onto by a storyteller wh…
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The apples - a fun story, though personally I don't see it as leading towards modern detective stories! The emphasis is on fate leading inexorably towards the self-revelation of the perpetrator, rather than anybody's skill in finding it out. There a…
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(Quote) Yes - Friar Tuck is hardly a paragon of sincere devotion :)
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I really enjoyed this week's read! Some thoughts: Early on in the 3rd dervish's tale we read "no praise for the reckless" which mirrors Isaiah's "no peace for the wicked" - but with an interestingly secular twist. It occurred to…
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I also had to buy a real physical copy as it's not available in kindle :o
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Hi all, plenty of time to chat more about The Wager, but also this is a quick reminder, should such be necessary, that November's read is Tripoint, by C. J. Cherryh, hosted by @clash_bowley who will, no doubt, be posting discussion starters at or ar…
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(Quote) I found this an interesting idea to explore! You could probably argue that the biblical story of Job fits your "Arabic" pattern, once again pushing this storytelling motif back into the ancient world. And of course the European tra…
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You're right, there are a lot of plot holes in these stories! Presumably Shahrazad or whoever simply reckoned that their listener would be carried along in the moment and not question it... The transformation into ape - there was a 19th century fas…
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Slightly ahead of expectation, I have set up the categories for the monthly reads in December (Witch World, @Apocryphal ) and January (The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, @NeilNjae ). As usual I've started them off with the cover blurb and a snippet…
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(Quote) Well, Witch World is complete in itself as a story, though it is true that it is continued in Web of in a way that ties up a number of loose ends. But it's perfectly fine to read just Witch World on its own
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A recent read of mine was Julia (https://amzn.eu/d/97NsHvM) - a retelling of 1984 from the perspective of Julia, the woman who Winston from the original book has a fling with. The book is billed as a feminist retelling - I wasn't altogether sure abo…
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> @RichardAbbott said: > I'll ask my bookseller friend in the village if he came across this last year and if so if he has any opinions about it I chatted with him yesterday and he had heard of it but not seen it so didn't have anything in…
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Great! I'll set that up as well early in the week
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I'll set up the discussion area for Witch World in the next day or so.
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I also realised belatedly that David Brann is author of several other books, all of which seem to deal with the behaviours of people, usually explorers of one kind or another, in extremis. So for example The Lost City of Z, dealing with exploring th…
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(Quote) How splendid!
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(Quote) Yes, totally - British law as enacted in courts is almost entirely about precedent and analogy with previous cases, so I can easily imagine a court not wanting to set a precedent where they weren't sure about the rights and wrongs of the mat…
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(Quote) As in "fleet of foot" etc
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Yes there was a lot of additional material at the end of the kindle book, which I personally didn't find added much. Something I wondered was the choice of presentation of the material... I wondered if it would have been better presented in novel…
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There were a lot of characters - necessarily so because of the historical events, but I don't think a novelist would have nearly so many important and/or viewpoint characters. It's all too easy to kind of forget who's who and what allegiance they ha…
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@NeilNjae neatly sums up my own position on this.
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Other things I have read suggest that whilst the regulations were explicit about mutiny, and extremely wide in their interpretation of what constituted mutiny, in practice they were not enforced via often, and there is a fascinating contrast between…
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Like the others so far, I've read plenty of naval fiction set in the Age of Sail but almost all of that has been set later on, around the time of the Napoleonic Wars (eg Alexander Kent, CS Forester, Patrick O'Brian) and rather less survival stories.…
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I'll ask my bookseller friend in the village if he came across this last year and if so if he has any opinions about it
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(Quote) It certainly is available in kindle at least in the UK and probably elsewhere. I have regular Andre-Norton-reading-fests - she was so enormously prolific that I have still nowhere near exhausted her repertoire :) They hold a particular memo…