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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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Couldn't find another suitable place for this, but one little nugget I got from rereading the introduction was that the northern continent hosts around sixty different warring factions, constantly quarreling and making short-lived alliances. I had a…
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(Quote) There seems to be a widely held view that is is a genuine subtitle, but I have not yet found any real evidence for settling it one way or the other (which is, perhaps, a commentary on the book itself...)
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Not sure what to think of this. On one level, CP never gave me at least a reason to care, other than a kind of puzzle-solving curiosity. I felt that given the complexity of what he had written, and the comments of other reviewers as supplied by @Apo…
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The book is full of apparent authors! Some are writers of different islands' descriptions - and I am assuming here that not all entries were written by the same person, in view of the several-times-repeated assertion that most of the archipelago inh…
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Mostly here in this discussion just to see what others think. But I would have preferred a map, even one that I knew was only partially accurate and subject to change. After all, the authors/compilers of the gazetteer knew enough to tell us that thi…
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Also happy to keep going. I don't like all of CP's stylistic choices, and don't feel that I have any kind of handle on what he was trying to do with Islanders, but I do think I would like to persevere with his work. I am hopeful that at least somewh…
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First let me say what an awesome set of discussion starters these posts are :) Well done! Picking out some of your points: Structure - I still don't think it's a novel, though definitely a work of fiction. For example, although it is presented in a…
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Definite decision: I'll be posting discussion starters next Thursday or Friday, May 5th or 6th!
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> @Apocryphal said: > And therefore the Islanders, like the Islands, are broken and separate? Yes indeed - one could probably argue that this brokenness manifests itself in all kinds of different ways. I started to make up a list but reali…
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(Quote) The cover text is, of course, a deliberate inversion of John Donne's No man is an island which is interesting not just as a theme in itself but as (I believe) a deliberate reversal of Donne's conclusion (Quote) I do think that relationships…
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(Quote) That seems reasonable - certainly their names are complementary, though I'm not sure their personalities are storing of the balance. (Quote) I have to confess I'd completely forgotten we'd met the glowing sand dune before. But I agree abou…
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Yes, trying to interpret the symbology of a woman who makes holes and a man who fills them doesn't take too much insight. So far as I recall we had not heard of Oy before, nor of what you might call an anti-tunnelling art form. The whole tunnellin…
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@Apocryphal @cl, on ash_bowley I'm very happy to wait a week before posting, on the first weekend in May. Any other thoughts or preferences?
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All, I have set up a discussion category for the end of this month. You can either browse for it under the Monthly Book Selections menu item, or go for the direct link https://www.ttrpbc.com/categories/-99-%28april-2021%29-aztec-century-by-christoph…
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I picked Paladin because I was impressed by @NeilNjae 's comments on it a while ago. Nothing against Empire. I've actually never seen Princess Bride though have known people whose opinions I respect who speak highly of it. Basically I'm cool with an…
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> @Apocryphal said: > (Quote) > Hence the name 'The Islanders'? > This made me think of the long-running UK soap opera Eastenders, a moderately dark series which - like The Islanders - doesn't attempt to cover all of London's East…
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Another recurring theme is a constant tension between "this island is so great that nobody leaves it once having come" versus "these well-known people have all lived on pretty much very listed island". And also, I guess, a tensio…
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(Quote) All of which brings us back to something we speculated on many chapters ago, viz whether the sundry names are all built around some overarching principle (and if so, what that might be)
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(Quote) I don't know much about Nordic myth (except indirectly via JRRT) so had not seen this possible connection. But the conversation between the two of you made me think of the Lady of Shalott, AKA Elaine of Astolat (a story which as some of you …
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(Quote) I think so (but then I chose it :) ) but agree that it is a slow build-up. That might well be a good issue as a discussion starter...
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Oh excellent... I've never read this
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Some recent research on the Aztec language, now being recognised as a highly sophisticated writing system but historically suppressed during Cortes's conquest. Presumably in the timeline of this book it was retained and extended as new technologies …
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I was also expecting a direct link to the death and was pleasantly surprised. It is clear that CP is deliberately messing with the readers' heads here - Torm's feelings of surprise about the rather pleasant nature of the land which he had anticipate…
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Some great stuff there @Apocryphal thanks for posting it
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(Quote) Ah ok fair enough, point taken. (Quote) In City of Illusions, Ursula LeGuin says something like "planets are very large on any scale except for the gaps between them", and tries to establish this size as Falk travels across the pl…
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(Quote) Which brings me back to another point we discussed many weeks ago - the whole set of islands, wherever they are in the world, exhibit essentially one culture (I think @NeilNjae characterised it as liberal western). There is no real diversity…
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(Quote) I don't know much about Derrida except the name, so please excuse naivety here, but this sounds like a linguistic version of yin/yang symbolism in Taoism, where each contains the seed of the other, and the key issue is the continual transfor…
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> @NeilNjae said: > (Quote) > Threads don't show as having unread items until you've posted in them. You have to keep an eye on the subjects and dates to see if any brand-new threads have appeared. I think that depends on your notifica…
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> @NeilNjae said: > The "oriental" part of "orientalism" is the least-defining element of the trope. Orientalism is about defining non-Europeans as being everything opposed to how Europeans want to see themselves. The orig…
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Here at the guest house we occasionally get guests who believe that they can sense something of previous occupants. Now, we don't know enough of the history of the building to confirm or deny the truth of this (the house was originally built in the …