Gillio Posted February 5, 2014 Share Posted February 5, 2014 Thought I'd just pop this in here Its a casting game http://www.pinterest.com/aralmiles/the-lymond-chronicles-from-the-written-page-to-the/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pecan Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 I tried to read the first Lymond book but oh wow, it was just really hard to get through the prose. I guess that's what you call dense. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gillio Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 Try again. It gets easier, I promise. :thumbsup: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wolverine Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 I tried to read the first Lymond book but oh wow, it was just really hard to get through the prose. I guess that's what you call dense. Wicked dense. Would be great to have some footnotes or something. Sometimes I read her stuff with a computer close by to look up stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gaston de Foix Posted February 8, 2014 Share Posted February 8, 2014 I've recommended both series before, and will join everyone else in doing so again. Dunnett was amazing. Her prose, her layered plotting, her incredible research and verisimilitude -- she was unique. Regarding the Lymond series, it's best to start with them first, but bear in mind that if you find the first book, Game of Kings, heavy-going due to particularly baroque prose, it is something of an outlier -- the prose gets a bit less opaque in the following novels. I tried the book only to give up for the baroqueness of the first 15 pages. This exactly addresses my concerns. Ran, would you compare it to ASOIAF in terms of quality? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gillio Posted February 9, 2014 Share Posted February 9, 2014 I would!! The start of the first book "Lymond is back!" confused the heck out of me the first time, but on a re-read, i feel a delicious anticipation, like at the start of a roller coaster. Having said that, I still haven't convinced hubby to try again, he likes much more straightforward books. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kli Posted February 11, 2014 Share Posted February 11, 2014 I tried to read the first Lymond book but oh wow, it was just really hard to get through the prose. I guess that's what you call dense. It's weird, but to me Lymond, while baroque, isn't particularly dense or close-packed. Everything breathes, you just kinda have to slow down to take it all in, in my view. And weirdly, despite the prose being more decorated and elaborate, it was easier for me to mine the meaning out of Lymond than it was out of Niccolo. I used to describe the difference between the two series as like watching a painter change media. To me, Lymond is oils: everything is clearly delineated, or painted over/hidden but all the layers are there and discernible. But with Niccolo, it's as if she switched to watercolors, where everything looks bright and transparent, but you have to deduce by negative space, outlines, things aren't hidden or elided, they're simply not drawn in and you have to deduce by the stuff that's around them. While the prose in Niccolo is simpler, the occurrences and thoughts behind it are more complex, it's weirdly much more obfuscating and opaque than the elaborations accomplish in Lymond's verbiage. A very simple sentence ("Date stones.") can set off an avalanche of remembrance and association. Or it could just be that it took me something like six tries with Niccolo before I 'got' it--too many expectations set up and then cut out from under me by having read Lymond. Migod the red herrings.... I tried the book only to give up for the baroqueness of the first 15 pages. This exactly addresses my concerns. Ran, would you compare it to ASOIAF in terms of quality? Another vote that it is. The quality is different, but it's as high or higher. Lymond took a while to take off for me as well, but it's not as tough as, say, ploughing your way through Riddley Walker. :) To me, reading Dunnett is also a bit like reading Patrick O'Brian. Takes a while to acclimate, 'cause nobody else does what they do, but once you slip in through that door, it's awesome. OTOH, if the prose is far too richly decorated and the incident too dense with Dunnett, you could try reading an author who was undoubtedly a precursor of hers (and whom, when I asked her, she admitted was a huge influence): Rafael Sabatini. I know it's incredibly perverse to think this way, but I sometimes mentally class Sabatini now as Dunnett-lite. Quite a few Sabatinis are in the public domain, so you can download mobis and epubs of a lot of the classic titles for free. I say start with Scaramouche, or if you're coming off of Dunnett then either Bellarion the Fortunate or Chivalry--maaaaybe St. Martin's Summer, but if you're in a mood for some swashbuckling, then Captain Blood, The Sea-Hawk, The Black Swan, or The Sword of Islam are probably the ones you wanna target. If you're coming off Cornwell or O'Brian, then maybe The Snare. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gillio Posted February 12, 2014 Share Posted February 12, 2014 Wicked dense. Would be great to have some footnotes or something. Sometimes I read her stuff with a computer close by to look up stuff. there is this the lymond poems and these, keep meaning to get them The Dorothy dunnett companion Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kli Posted February 12, 2014 Share Posted February 12, 2014 Ok, only for the crazy Dunnett fans who might also enjoy opera (or at least like laughing at opera), a long time ago on a sunny day in Golden Gate Park, I took part in a mini DD fan-gathering that was known as "I Spit West". A bunch of Dunnett fans were planning two get-togethers simultaneously: one on the East Coast in NYC, the other in San Francisco, and one of the ringleaders of that group, Tovah Hollander, paraphrased the first line of one of Dunnett's Johnson Johnson/Dolly novels ("Men in bifocal glasses. I spit."), and wrote, "Fans in bicoastal conventions. I spit." And thus the gatherings were christened. I believe there were later I Spit North and I Spit South gatherings as well. Anyhow, at I Spit West, we had a mad time playing "pin the scar on Nicholas or Lymond" (a scar would be described. You then got a possible maximum of three points by declaring (correctly) 1) whether it was Nicholas's or Lymond's, 2) what the incident was that caused it, and 3) which book it happened in. And if you got the points, you could then draw the scar on the handy dandy outlines provided. These were later mailed to Mrs. Dunnett, who was somewhat appalled to see the damage she'd inflicted on her heroes en masse like that. And the giggles and shrieks of comments like, "THAT's what Joleta carves on his chest?!!" were undoubtedly getting us a few stares from passersby. Anyhoo, later that evening after a good dinner and not a few glasses of wine, mellowing out, the inevitable "Hey, let's play the Lymond casting game..." started up, only after the thousandth round, nobody was really getting into it, until one of the group members (who was a professional opera singer), began to wonder what Lymond would be like as an opera. And someone said, "Oh! Francis HAS to be a coluratura tenor!!" and we were off to the races. Jokes about "opera-logic" began to come thick and fast. When we got home, Tovah emailed all of us the fruits of her labor, "Franceso Y Filipa", which was later performed for Mrs. Dunnett by that same group, at a Dunnett gathering in Edinburgh. From all accounts, it was a rousing success. Just felt like mentioning it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kli Posted February 13, 2014 Share Posted February 13, 2014 You're welcome! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PMGiovinazzo Posted September 9, 2014 Share Posted September 9, 2014 My sister and I are huge Dunnett fans so when we started reading ASOIAF we assumed GRRM had been inspired by her novels because of the whole baby switching theme, riddles of parentage and especially the game of thrones or as dunnett identifies it: the game of kings. Most telling is that Dunnett's Lymond series and Niccolo series can be read over and over again and still continue to offer new revelations, much as Martin's books do making them rare and wonderful in the world of literature. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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