‘And may least this river at least to you with ollie to wastard the very galley …’ The Queen Dowager stretched no drew tender of his interested and pat him soft back. ‘In felt on your bray France?’ He made England deright on the provering their feets and stepped,’ said Lymond propled to kelp the strust. Somerville streight eyes, her face stusted vaous of the clanders, and he spirting his voice, ‘It was to you in. But if you thing Robin Stewart is sole and praminery, are you surely for you less in the pilicical and spairs. Was the ages. Will music free.’

‘I ampressater. And my own ride shoot with a match in the my sassle and the space.’ Back into the leasting the gate, then with unsound her own electian, sight in God’s pleated to rall on them and then nastian Crawford of Don, not a play here in the gardle of the scontle of the secretary, “You’re that the mecains of a grave difficult thull fands we have a leng unlike you, and with has a suddenly like a paused of the wood quarney in Stewart.”

“He doubt here to Pound—”

Mo, with the one responce of his coon. If the onle hand on the rained at the child voice, and read it for the window hereed and rose her foot Edglish spittors? As when he propped his own life, and the are In the peace suppress-trick he solding. “What will you tell that all nearly ocheress to lack the creak to here as vince and one you any of a master of the Masser food and look to Crawford with a contrimicul at Gromasious the great this the left of phears and have it.’

I’m training the neural network on Dorothy Dunnett now

Incidentally, in re Lymond, I’m nearly done with Book 2 but kind of bogged down because it’s not nearly as good as Book 1

I would interpret this as the usual “sequels with diminishing returns” thing except everyone says the second half of the series is better than the first??  So I am still going, slowly

the lymond chroncles (still on bk 2 of 6)

You know, this plot would feel really complicated even if it weren’t for the fact that the standard way of relating

“X did Y”

to the reader is to have a character say something like

“Ah, and I had been expecting my elegantine carriage among the orbes coelestium.  But I’ll be direct.  I’m damned sure Dundale’s obstreperousness is like milk to Maecenas.  May we permit our gild-flecked friend to tarry a moment among the naves, jouissaient sans mensonge et sans anxiété?”

Thanks to the amount of over-complicated scheming in Queens’ Play, and the way that Lymond keeps ending up in bizarre, dangerous circumstances while drunk or otherwise out-of-sorts, I’ve started strongly associating it with The Big Lebowski

I keep expecting characters to say “new shit has come to light, man”

The Lymond Chronicles is so much fun.  (Just finished Part 1 of Book 2.)  I’m really glad I stuck it out through the difficult bits of Book 1.

If you want a 3000-page engrossing series full of extremely complicated intrigue and machinations, and you want it to be about a Scottish, hyperverbal, sarcastic, poetry-quoting, dramatic-plot-hatching Gary Stu entangled in implausibly many aspects of mid-16th-century European politics whose brother obsessively hates him in that Kate Beaton way, and you want disguises and double-crosses and fencing duels and blistering climactic courtroom scenes and assassination attempts involving elephants, and you want it to be actually well-written, with interesting turns of phrase on every page

and you are OK with having to flip back to the giant roster of characters in the front of the book all the time, and with dialogue so obliquely witty you’ll have no idea what anyone is talking about half the time, and with a first volume that drops you both in medias res and into the very densest of the verbal fray and leaves you to fend for yourself until you get your bearings around page 300,

read The Lymond Chronicles.

halcedry:

nostalgebraist:

Folded with infinite care on the sweet edge between agony and delight she suffered a kiss of expert passion which made itself lord of all the senses, of thought, and of the dead fields of time.

you’re reading lymond?? that line is absolutely ridiculous but that series forever has my vast and unironic love

Yes, I’m about halfway through the first book.  I’m enjoying it in a lot of ways (cool writing style, Lymond being outrageous) although man is the plot and dialogue confusing.

(A lot of the conversations are kind of like:

A: “I am wittily insinuating that doing the thing you’re proposing will have unforeseen side effects”

B: “Oh, that remark was so [allusion to 16th-century thing now forgotten]”

A: “I’m stating in the most convoluted way possible that the cleverness of that rejoinder will not save you from the dire potential third-order effects of your proposal, given the recent change of heart exhibited by [obscure minor character]”

B: “[line of untranslated French]”

A: “Oh, if you’re going to be like that, I guess you won’t mind if I [archaic verb] like a [disreputable archaic noun phrase] with the [metaphorical description of god knows what]”

B: “Do that if you want!  It’s not as if I hadn’t prepared for the fact that this conversation would inevitably goad you into doing just that [classical allusion expressing the concept “which conveniently plays right into my master plan”]

etc.)

(via etirabys)