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Starters for Daughter of Redwinter posted...
Here's my pick for when i'm next up in the rotation. My wife 'found' the book on the current shelf at the Book Trader and picked it up on a whim. She loved it - great writing and great characters, apparently. Then my mother read it and she also loved it.
It's not their usual fare (though my mother does like historical fiction, mostly mysteries). It's a novel of naval warfare, set during the war of 1812. Available on Kindle in the UK, and Kindle or Print in Canada and the USA.
Come Looking for Me, by Cheryl Cooper
COVER BLURB:
I'd read it!
Sounds good
Sorry I posted this next bit in the wrong thread...
All: we have Theory of Bastards, chosen by @clash_bowley as our June read.
Presuming that the rotation goes on as before, July would be @Apocryphal then August @NeilNjae then September me.
@NeilNjae do you know what your reading / discussion situation will be like in August?
@BarnerCobblewood or @Michael_S_Miller do either of you want to pick a monthly read?
Nothing leaps out at me as being an urgent read. One book I may suggest is Ninefox Gambit, which re-appeared on my radar because it has an RPG coming out. The downside is it's the first of a trilogy, but I don't know how stand-alone it is.
Actually, a couple of alternative suggestions, if we want to get away from the standard of reading "SFF novels of the last fifty years."
One is the current Humble Bundle of RPG guide books, which features a bunch of books to supplement RPGs. Some guides to bodies of mythology, books of prompts and tables to round out characters and gameworlds, some game play advice, and even some recipies! We could pick a couple of them to skim over, and consider how they do or don't help our particular play.
Another is the Arabian Nights. I've been reading the recent Lyons & Lyons translation of the tales. We couldn't tackle the whole of the corpus (or even one volume) for a monthly read, but we could pick the first few stories. I'm not sure what questions we'd ask, it being a traditional work. But it would be a change of pace.
Any thoughts?
I'm cool with non-fiction! Or Arabian Nights. Or Ninefox Gambit.
I was going to propose Arabian Nights at some point, but the version I was going to propose was translated by native Arabic speaker, and I don’t think it has all the tales - maybe just focusing on the original ones? I can see which edition this is when I get home.
Some other ideas:
There’s also a new recent translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson, first English translation by a woman. I’d be game for that. It’s 592 pp, but much of that will be footnotes, citations, and bibliography, I assume.
Last year I stumbled upon The Ulysses Voyage, by Tim Severin, in a little free library, and I loved it. He has many more such books - The Jason Voyage, The Brendan Voyage, etc. Assuming they follow the outline of the one I read, he tries to retrace the original voyage in a recreated vessel, and documents the landmarks, culture, and geography that might have inspired the myth.
I have the Brendan Voyage and would be fine with any Tim Severin book...
Added: Oh! I would be fine with RPG guidebooks too!
Sorry all for some reason I didn't get any notifications of all these additions and only just checked back.
@Apocryphal for July shall I set up for Come Looking for Me, by Cheryl Cooper?
@NeilNjae I'd actually be cool with an RPG guide book - it doesn't have as much direct relevance to me as a book book but I'd be curious about things like how gameplay relates to storytelling, and how much of what you might call authentic detail goes into a game.
On other topics suggested, I skim-read Arabian Nights some years back and would like the opportunity to read it slower. The Odyssey is an interesting one as it's one of those books that you think you know and probably don't know half as well as you thought you did. I had a similar feeling reading The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller some while back - I kept thinking "I don't remember that from The Iliad" and inevitably it mostly turned out that I didn't remember it very well at all. But nearly 600 pages is a big read - maybe it's a two-month special?
I've not heard of Tim Severin so don't have a view there.
@RichardAbbott Sure, you can set that up. 😁
I read the classic Sir Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights, and loved it! A different, more recent translation might be cool!
For information, the Lyons translation of Arabian Nights is about 2600 pages, and my Fagles translation of The Odyssey is about 400 pages (but those are two-third length lines of "spoken lines"), plus introduction and notes. And there are many translations of these books. The Lyons one seems to be described as "simple and direct prose, a little dull in places." The Burton translation seems to be "exuberant, sometimes excessively so, and prurient in places." I don't know about others.
I've had more of a skim through the Ultimate RPG book collection. There's some interesting stuff in there, but I think not enough to support a discussion.
(And if we're doing epics, how about Beowulf or Canterbury Tales sometime?)
Yah, 2600 pages would be a seriously long read so we'd have to cherry pick. One of the interesting things about The Odyssey, Arabian Nights (I think) and Beowulf is that we would be dealing with works originally constructed in an oral tradition and then later on committed to writing, so you get a different set of conventions at work there. Some translators will attempt to retain the associated literary forms and others won't. And of course with all three of them (and to a large extent Canterbury Tales as well) we are dealing with a work in translation, which brings in a whole other set of issues.
It has 31 tales which are collated into 9 stories (some ‘stories’ contain multiple ‘tales’). It’s 518 pages plus about 25 italicized pages of introductory material. This is according to the index. Flipping through, the text is broken down by night, ending at the 271st night. I don’t know if any nights are skipped.
If we went slow read style, we could add The Arabian Nights: A Companion, by Robert Irwin, which is about 300 pages of text. It’s not a companion to any specific edition, I don’t think.
Category for Come Looking for Me ( @Apocryphal 's choice for July) now set up, together with cover blurb and about the author entries. Time to set up notifications...
There may still be some chatter about Theory of Bastards, but this is also a reminder of July's choice, Come Looking for Me, by Cheryl Cooper, chosen by @Apocryphal.
@NeilNjae have you made a decision about August yet?
Let's be boring, and stick with Ninefox Gambit. We could so a slow read of Arabian Nights in parallel, if anyone's interested.
I would be!
> Let's be boring, and stick with Ninefox Gambit. We could so a slow read of Arabian Nights in parallel, if anyone's interested.
I'll set that up soon
> (Quote)
> I would be!
Likewise
Sorted - pleas set up notification preferences (though mine haven't been working recently
)
What was the translation we are going to use? I'll need to get it!
there's a whole thread in that one sentence alone
All: discussion for Come Looking for Me seems to have finished so this is a reminder to read Ninefox Gambit, for which @NeilNjae wil be leading discussion at the end of August.
For September I'm thinking of a change of mood to a witty 2001 debut novel called The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (an English writer who now lives in Wales). It's in the British tradition of comedy thinly disguised as SF and was sufficiently successful that Fforde wrote several more in the series - but this one shows no real signs that others were planned. I don't think we've read it before ( @Apocryphal please confirm) and it'll be a big contrast with Ninefox Gambit.
If there are no objections I'll set the web category up.
If you like that, you may like Aberystwyth Mon Amour and sequels, a comedy version of hardboiled detective fiction on the mean streets of Aberystwyth.
Either the Lyons & Lyons version The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights (2010, 3 volumes, lets start with the first) or the Horta & Seale version The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights (2021).
I've read most of volume 1 on the Lyons & Lyons. It's good, but there's a lot of it, and the stories vary in quality. I've not read the Horta & Seale version, but reviews sound good, and it's mostly the "best bits".
When you decide let us know!