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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,183
- 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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> @clash_bowley said: > I'm in! Excellent thanks @clash_bowley
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(Quote) This sounds good. @NeilNjae are you happy for Vita Nostra to be your September choice in the overall rotation? If so, I'll put out a general message inviting anyone who wants to participate in the rotation again. Also, I'd love to reread Du…
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I was struck by the revelation that the war had (allegedly) gone on for 3000 years! Even Haldeman's Forever War didn't last that long... 1997-3143 = a mere 1146 years, mostly spent in relativistic time dilation. In our-universe terms that means they…
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Sounds fascinating and I'd certainly be up for reading that as a group. Looks like we may have our September read... Any other thoughts from anyone?
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I rebought Joe Haldeman's Worlds series a while ago, but in kindle not p/b
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Also disappointed, after the build up in the first 2/3 which seemed very promising. My take on parts of it was that CP was again exploring hallucinogenic effects, this time from the rose petals as opposed to grenades or the like. So this section ma…
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> @NeilNjae said: > I enjoyed the film, so I'm interested see what the book's like. I hadn't realised it was made into a film until I read the preface
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I have added a new category under Monthly Book Selections for this - please remember to add to your notifications so you don't miss out :) The direct link is https://www.ttrpbc.com/categories/102-%28august-2021%29-cloud-atlas-by-david-mitchell or a…
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(Quote) Agreed, it's a mystery at present
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(Quote) Well, according to Wiki (which is of course unquestionably correct :) ) the peninsula we now call Qatar was famous in the Kassite Babylonian period as a source of purple dye, in the early CE for pearls, then in the 8th century CE for horses …
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(Quote) Totally. It's like reading books allegedly set in the classical Mediterranean world where suddenly the ideal of beauty becomes a kind of blonde cheerleader figure. Often in such a case one feels it's a lack of imagination on the author's par…
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I have found it curious (but forgot to mention last week) that here CP uses a name remarkably close to a real-world country, viz Qatar. There doesn't seem (so far as I can tell) a huge similarity between Qataar and Qatar, or the cultures described..…
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Well, there's an interesting thing that I came some years ago back in ancient poetry study times. I had a secondary supervisor who specialised in New Kingdom Egyptian poetry, and he had a theory that scribes preferentially selected glyphs which visu…
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(Quote) I have now done this in a separate thread (couldn't work out how to add to this one) - see https://www.ttrpbc.com/discussion/638/august-book-choices/p1?new=1
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My wife read (actually, listened to) Klara and the Sun, and the bits she passed on to me sounded quite interesting, though not compelling. Ishiguro is perhaps best know for his book on cloning (Never Let me Go) which I have both read and seen - the …
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(Quote) A good point - they are a great idea in themselves but seem completely at odds with other parts of his world building. I guess it's another case of there being not one world but lots of quite similar ones, each with their own spin on particu…
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This first section has been a great setup story for me - well-drawn and interesting if enigmatic characters who (so far) have been acting in ways that make good sense given their back-stories, some provocative additional bits of world-building - for…
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(Quote) I like that! There could be mileage here... BTW I realised on rereading what I last wrote that I called the author of The Magus Simon Fowles, when he was (of course) John Fowles. An especially odd slip when John Fowles added a testimonial q…
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(Quote) When I read this I thought of Simon Fowles's The Magus, though as I recall the protagonist survives that book. (Quote) Maybe that's what's behind the other guests saying "GraianSheeld" in patois which he assumes is another word th…
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To be honest this all seemed a bit motiveless. I came away not in any way understanding why the various people did what they did. I had assumed at one stage that the thyrmes were a kind of stand-in for sex (seeing as how they enter the body and popu…
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Hi all, l have been unable to contact @Ray_Otus so there will be a reading gap in July, except for The Dream Archipelago slow read carrying on thanks to @Apocryphal . In August @BarnerCobblewood will be choosing our selection which he will no dou…
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> @NeilNjae said: > Something else that occurred to me about politics in the books. There are factions, but the book doesn't concern itself with them. Instead, it's concerned with the people who head those factions. Most obviously there's the…
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Something that probably fits here is a thought that occurred to me over the weekend. For all that I really loved the book (have I mentioned that elsewhere? :) ) it did occur to me that I didn't have much of an emotional reaction to it. I can't remem…
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Commenting so as to see what others write :) As a writer, I often get feedback that food plays too much of a role in my books. I also include music in various forms, but not art or sculpture as I now next to nothing about that and don't feel I cold…
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A peripheral thought about politics, triggered by a family conversation yesterday with no reference to A Memory Called Empire at all! (And I should add in case it's not obvious that my comments have to do with UK politics, not anywhere in North Amer…
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(Quote) As in "War is the continuation of politics by other means" (von Clauswitz)? (Quote) I saw her more like the character of Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones, who began working for Daenerys as a spy but then switched loyalties away fr…
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Some were inevitably more thoroughly drawn and more rounded than others: this is not a fault but the consequence of some people playing more of a part than others. There was a general trend that people who were higher up in the hierarchy were more l…
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This was another aspect I really appreciated about the book. It brought up a series of related thoughts which I'll try to put down here in semi-coherent form. Firstly, I think there are two issues at the fore here (which Arkady touches on in that a…
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Loved it! All of it! An excellent choice, for which thanks. Again as I have mentioned in other points, there were echoes of other books - for example the city-world was a bit like Trantor in Foundation - but the creations were unique and, for me at…
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Most believable, I thought. I felt utterly absorbed in both worlds. There were, naturally, coincidental echoes between Teixcalaan and the Aztec world we read of recently in Aztec Century, but here they were elaborated with much more thoroughness and…