{"id":696,"date":"2026-05-08T22:42:01","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T22:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dorothydunnett.co.uk\/blog\/?p=696"},"modified":"2026-05-08T22:42:01","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T22:42:01","slug":"forthcoming-new-feature-lymond-reading-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dorothydunnett.co.uk\/blog\/book-discussion\/forthcoming-new-feature-lymond-reading-notes.php","title":{"rendered":"Forthcoming New Feature – Lymond Reading Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"

As some of you may be aware, I’m currently leading a Zoom-based Lymond Reading Group for the Dorothy Dunnett Society, and we’re doing a spoiler-free reading of Game of Kings<\/em>. We’ve had our second meeting, and while we’re still finding our feet a little and seeing what works for us, I think we can say it’s going pretty well, the members are enthusiastically taking part in the discussions, and the three week schedule seems about right.<\/p>\n

While thinking about the setup after the first meeting I had sketched out some notes on the Opening Gambit which we had just read, highlighting what I felt were important points, use of language and humour, and how Dorothy had used various writing techniques to draw us into the story and begin to flesh out the characters.<\/p>\n

It occurred to me that I might make further use of these sorts of reading notes as the basis for a series of blog posts here – going chapter by chapter through the whole book (perhaps series) in a way that would help first time readers better understand the challenging prose and often conflicting information from multiple viewpoints that they were tackling, might help re-readers recapture some of thise first-time feelings of exhilaration and joy at reading something so different from anything that had gone before, and would also allow those DDS members in incompatible time zones such Australasia and the west coast of the US to get a feeling for how the group were approaching the read.<\/p>\n

Now to be entirely clear these notes will not include mention of any discussions that take place within the group – that is private to the group members and naturally should remain so. It will be purely my own thoughts from nearly 30 years of reading Lymond, along with some others derived from conversations and from social media interactions where I’ve discussed the series with new readers in the past. It’s not piggybacking on the group, but will hopefully be an addition to it which is also valuable to other readers. I’ve run the idea past the group members in case anyone felt there was any conflict of interest and reaction has been positive, so I now feel comfortable in going ahead.<\/p>\n

I’ll publish the notes a couple of months behind where we are in the group read to help avoid spoilers for the new reader members and to maintain a degree of distance from it. And I’ll try and write it without revealing much if any foreknowledge of the character development or plot, so that I’m assessing as much as possible on the basis of what we know so far.<\/p>\n

I hope you’ll enjoy these posts and perhaps contribute your memories of your own early reads in the comments. And of course feel free to disagree with anything – I’m by no means infallible and there are always other interpretations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As some of you may be aware, I’m currently leading a Zoom-based Lymond Reading Group for the Dorothy Dunnett Society, and we’re doing …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-discussion","category-lymond-chronicles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dorothydunnett.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dorothydunnett.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dorothydunnett.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorothydunnett.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorothydunnett.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=696"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorothydunnett.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":700,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorothydunnett.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696\/revisions\/700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dorothydunnett.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorothydunnett.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorothydunnett.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}