Big Fat Book September Update

I do have progress to report on my Big Fat Book Project this month as opposed to last month. I have now finished 9 of 21 CDs of The Game of Kings, the first book in the Lymond Chronicles, by Dorothy Dunnett. This means I've crossed 200 pages in the paper copy. This is my story of how I came to do a Big Fat Book Project.

For the record, I'm listening to the audiobook and also reading the paper copy, er, not simultaneously.

I was hooked to the story from the very third track of the first CD. The first track was an introduction by Dunnett, while the second was a daunting list of characters that went on and on, and I promptly forgot the one when he stated who the next was. This is where having a paper copy of the book was immensely helpful. Whenever I ran into "now who the heck is this?," I could quickly leaf to the relevant pages and glance over the list.

Another advantage of the paper copy was the ability to consult the map at the front of the book whenever a place name cropped up. Now how could he see the smoke plumes of Midculture from the battlements of Boghall? Ah, yes, of course.

I had assumed that my attention would wander as I listened to the audio—and it did, as in I wasn't one hundred percent focused at all times—but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I had retained of the story. Every few days, I caught up on my listening in my paper copy. I had retained not just the gist of the plot but also the nuances of some of the characterizations.

The reader, or rather performer, Samuel Gillies gets the credit for retaining my interest and for the depth of my retention. He has a good speaking voice with clear diction and no verbal conversational tics. He does male characters really well with enough variation in tone, inflection, and pronunciation to distinguish between them. His medieval English accent was superb as was his Scottish accent, but luckily, he did them sparingly. At first, I was afraid that since there are a plethora of Scottish characters, Gillies would read the entire book that way, but thankfully, he didn't. My quibble was with his French accent, which was execrable. I'm not qualified to comment on his German, Spanish, Italian, or Latin accents, or other languages I did not recognize.

One downside to this book (audio and paper) is that there're not an insignificant number of small sections in languages other than the Queen's English. And there are no translations whatsoever. Other than the French, I understood nothing. It irked me to have to skip over the passages, because, you know, like, I might be missing something important there.

What is lost in the audio listening are references to things I don't know about. For example, I didn't know that the word Erasmian referred to the pre-Protestant and Humanist ideas propounded by Catholic priest Erasmus of Rotterdam in the 16th century. Another example was the word mouldiewarps, which is an archaic word for a mole. I heard these and many others like these as foreign words, which were therefore incomprehensible. However, when they came up in the paper copy, I looked them up, and now I know, and my reading of those scenes is richer for that knowledge. Yes, I admit that it was a trifle wearing to sit with a dictionary at my elbow.

The scenes that feature Lymond are the ones with a plethora of foreign phrases, quotations, and uncommon words and references. Those also happen to be integral to the story so the urge to understand is urgent.

A con of choosing to do the audio and the paper is that I'm proceeding at a much slower pace than had I done one or the other. I have to play catch-up sometimes in one medium and so halt the progress in the other. I wouldn't say I'm half as slow, but definitely significantly slower.

I owe Kaetrin another word of thanks for her suggestion to exercise while listening. My attention wandered far less than it otherwise would have if I had not been physically doing something mindless while listening to the reading. I also found, thankfully, that when something interesting was going on, I was exercising longer. Win!

For the story itself, you have to start with its central scapegrace of a character. Francis Crawford of Lymond, Master of Culter, is articulate, literate, treasonous, treacherous, with a viper's tongue and elastic morals, utterly self-involved, full of ennui and grace, poetically insouciant, beautiful, and a murdering thief.

The gist of the book is that Scotland is still free in 1547, but has already suffered a crashing defeat at the hands of the English. The English want to marry their boy King Edward VI to Scotland's toddler Mary, Queen of Scots, thereby finally uniting both countries under the English crown. So far, they've been unsuccessful in carrying her off. So war brews and rumbles along the Scottish Borders. Scotland's future rests in the hands of the anti-hero Lymond. (This has got to be one heck of a character arc for Lymond. My imagination fails me in picturing Lymond's transformation from anti-hero to hero. So I remain agog to see how Dunnett is going to pull it off.)