My srs lack of time for reading/watching, let me show you it

[petronia]

I am however 5 chapters and some verse into The Disorderly Knights. It's the Dawn Treader of the series I guess. Also, its own kink_bingo fic. I am strongly nostalgic for the Mediterranean; 18 days til I'm in Barcelona and counting down urrrrrrgh more to come in this post, I am running late for a friend's sukiyaki dinner.

(J's, who weirdly enough is Maltese on his father's side. And looks it!)

EDIT -- So first thing off book 3 fills in some gaps in the timeline, which makes me wish I'd taken mine to the end of book 2 instead of book 1. Author assumes one spent book 2 wondering aloud, "Lymond hung around Midculter for two years? And no one stabbed him in the eye with a spork?" But there is a great outdoors full of Englishmen** and sheep and Will Scott and shenanigans, so. XD; Really author is backtracking for a bit of setup, but as Will put it re: the crossdressing, one's given shinier goals to focus on. Like building a bingo card. I dunno why I didn't call Lymond in a dress getting Sir Lord Wossname all bothered, you would think that was historical inevitability in hindsight, but the pirates? I called the pirates.

Chapter 3: everyone is appalled at there being less than six degrees of social separation between Lymond and a 15-year-old girl. They're like, shit! Is she hot? She is? This is bad! This causes Richard to out Lymond to Sybilla(!?), ironically because if the Hospitalers had been on the ball enough to send an amazingly pretty teenaged boy Richard would've been like fffff kid you're on your own. Also, I don't understand how everyone and their mom knows Lymond had a liaison with Oonagh. Who talked about this!?! Also-also, Lymond is not even IN THE COUNTRY. It's impossible to tell how Joleta plays into it but something awful is going to happen surely, maybe not even due to our hero XD; she's got that vibe, like Hagu out of Honey and Clover.

Chapters 4-5: knights. Pirates. Mediterranean. A political clusterfuck that's explained, straight up, so you don't have to divine the plot via shamanic means. Lymond is consulting within a client organization, a state of being as it were that I find hideously familiar, because all consulting gigs share common qualities and pitfalls. I've failed to remember anyone's name. Lymond has a friend, though! Like an osananajimi! I didn't expect that. I thought he would at least have to do some shopping in order to acquire knights. XD;;

** You don't know why the English try, in this book. It's basically Asterix versus the Romans.

Words I Didn't Know (a continuing series)
semmit
fremescent
rambade

Words Francis Lymond Shouldn't Know (idem)
...None, so far, unless you count "broccoli"! (With my background in marine insurance, I can tell you all that jargon is surprisingly old.) I should have started doing this from page 1, there were a lot more of them in GoK. XD "Pogrom" and "Buddhism", memorably. I appreciate that Dunnett decided not to bother - it's not as if the characters would have spoken in any semblance of modern English grammar and syntax anyway - but I notice every time. It doesn't quite eject me from the narrative; in fact it heightens the flavour of the thing, in some inexplicable fashion, like Sofia Coppola playing Aphex Twin in the background of a movie about Marie Antoinette. I am postmodern to the bitter end, it would appear. Also, the protagonist is hisself. Number of fucks I envisage Francis Crawford of Lymond giving that his massive English vocabulary extends 400 years into the future: zero

Comments

[marej.livejournal.com]

what is rambade? I had to look up semmit, too.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Foredeck of a ship, I think? Or front cabin? In French. As in, turns out it's not an English word, but it was a French ship. XD;;

[supacat.livejournal.com]

THIS IS THE BEST RECAP OF DUNNETT EVER

I thought he would at least have to do some shopping in order to acquire knights. XD;;

No you didn't, you knew he'd be like catnip to the knights, c'mon.

Also, its own kink_bingo fic.

Oh god. If you say that after five chapters.


I'm less sensitive to Lymond's anachronisms than you, but the one that clobbered me over the head and that I'll always always remember is 'shell shocked'.

It was harder for me to believe in the family reaction re: Joleta on rereads, I just went along with it the first time, but I suppose Richard assumes he'll despoil anything and Sybilla knows him well enough to know what he'll actually do, which is what she fears, because it's presumably worse.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Recaps are my thing, really. I'm incapable of producing serious translations or meta. XD;

No you didn't, you knew he'd be like catnip to the knights, c'mon.

Yeah, but he now has a starting condition of 1x knight when it would be more sporting to give him a handicap. XD ...As an aside, do you know I'm intimidated by the Knights of St. John. XD; It's like the French court - emotional imprinting via literature made so long ago I'm not entirely sure where it comes from.

Oh god. If you say that after five chapters.

Rolling, I'm looking forward to making multiple bingos.

My feeling re: Joleta - and this could be completely off-track - is that everyone read the "blatant" sexual danger into the situation when really they're reacting to a deeper sense of, something about her character in proximity with Lymond's character will cause Bad Consequences. My instinct would also be to separate them! Logically, I haven't seen Lymond sleep with anyone where it would be clearly detrimental to them or himself, and Joleta would be a clear no-no.

[supacat.livejournal.com]

As an aside, do you know I'm intimidated by the Knights of St. John. XD; It's like the French court - emotional imprinting via literature made so long ago I'm not entirely sure where it comes from.

Lol omg, your formative period was awesome. :D

You're so right about Joleta, it's an overpowering sense of No Good Can Come, which we all share, and which Richard parses into dim visions of depravity.

Logically, I haven't seen Lymond sleep with anyone where it would be clearly detrimental to them or himself, and Joleta would be a clear no-no.

Haha we've reached the point in the series where I just start to roll around frothing and saying 'How? How does Dunnett do this?' Because the markers telling us to respond to Joleta as Danger Will Robinson are clearly independent of the family's reaction -- and they are all constructed by Dunnett and embedded into the books, if only we could find them. ;__;

[supacat.livejournal.com]

clearly independent of the family's reaction AND OF LOGIC

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The inexplicable comedy of my online life is that not only did Farmville made me plant 1,200 cornflowers, it gave me a suit of armour for my avatar to clank around in the meanwhile.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The other thing about these last couple of chapters is a super-controlled gradual descent, banking like an airplane, into a 3rd-person POV focussed on Lymond, which I don't think has ever happened before. It feels more intimate to me than it's meant to be, probably, because what the narrative gives is his external perception and internal knowledge checks (they can't be anyone else's, in these scenes), and that's my default mode for tight 3rd. It's transparent - if you give me this information, I can reconstruct Lymond's interiority. And what it feels like is he's doing exactly what I would do on the initial phase of a consulting job, which is pretty creepy. XD;

[supacat.livejournal.com]

I think by DK she's more confident with the character of Lymond, and with handling viewpoint in general, so is able to do that for the first time without exploding the Mystique of Lymond -- but there's structural necessity there too, because as Lymond becomes more solitary and emotionally remote from the people around him post-QP, it's harder to track him solely through his reflections.

Probably also the reader knows Lymond well enough by now that a(nother) book where all the traction comes from "Who is Lymond and what is he doing?" is less possible, not that there isn't an element of that in DK, in all her books, really.

It's amazing to me from a writing standpoint that she actually can hold tension while banking into Lymond, there's such a level of sophistication in handling of narrative tension in that act, it's completely beyond my ken. If I even tried to write from the POV of the L from my own book, the traction would collapse, because I don't know how to make his interior explicit so that it fits into the narrative in a tense way. It would be like . . . take all the difficulty I am having cosntructing and holding tension atm AND THEN DOUBLE IT. Hahaha no, that exceeds my capacity. And that's within a much simpler book! XDD

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

Barcelona

The city or the planet? SORRY SORRY COULDN'T RESIST

These Dunnett posts are really starting to make me feel left out! ...Otoh I have the satisfaction of having actually finished watching Madoka. XD

[rondaview.livejournal.com]

HAI I don't know you too well but -- you should read this series too!! It is so fabulous. So fabulous.

Sabina I don't know how you take it all in stride but I was just prostate on the FLOOR from the Lymond-inna-dress shenanigans. LOLOLOL, DUNNETT O NO U DINT, etc.

And you have met Mr. Jerott Blyth! And ahahaha Joleta, she's really something, isn't she? I wonder if you'll call what happens next. Except for one scene about midway through the book, I sure didn't.

They're like, shit! Is she hot? She is? This is bad!
This is an accurate representation of my face: :D

[rondaview.livejournal.com]

Btw, I finished Consider Phlebas in the meantime and ... it's not very good! You may feel differently since I'm not sure what your readerly priorities are (mine, in roughly descending order, are a vivid sense of character, pretty writing, and a moving story) but if you find it hard going at first, just know that it doesn't get much better. XD; (And I'm not just saying this because I want you to read more Dunnett! I swear!)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

No no, I did a real life headdesk at Lymond-inna-dress. Just an overwhelming feeling of, I should have seen this coming. A much more auspicious beginning than focussing on Tom Erskine's need for Pepto-Bismol at the mention of Lymond's name, bless'm.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The city! :D :D

Gawd I feel like I will never have time to watch anything again everrrrr. Thinking tonight but you never know. The thing with the Dunnett is that I'm on an eBook now, so I can read in snatches. XD;

You can read the Dunnett! If nothing else the language level fills me with Zaraki Kenpachi's great and terrible joy upon encountering a worthy opponent. XD Knowing you, though... there is no OTP. Or if there is, it's the mother of delay maneuvres (quite a lot of time is spent on unravelling the protag's psychology).