Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett

I am alive and reading! For a few more months, anyway. Maybe Em will keep this blog alive during my Very Long Absence? We'll see!

I'll just take this moment to say that a part of me is screaming, "Eighteen months?!? I could read two hundred books in that time!" (Well, almost. Not if I was in school full time.) BUT THAT IS OK. I KNOW I'LL BE DOING WHAT I'M SUPPOSED TO BE DOING. WHICH MEANS THEREFORE THAT I SHOULDN'T BE READING THOSE TWO HUNDRED BOOKS.

The end.

Now, without further ado:

Game of Kings
start date: last year. Really. But for this latest attempt at reading and FINISHING it..a few weeks ago.
finish date: This morning. Or last night. However you want to look at it.
Star Rating: seven stars *******
"Movie" Rating: PG-13, because this is a war, and really, I would be depressed if someone under 13 read this and understood it better than me. (Well, not really. But sort of.)




I finished Game of Kings at 1 AM last night/this morning. I would have stayed up later if there were more pages.

I am glad that I sat down and said, "I will finish this!" after two unsuccessful attempts. Because it was worth it. Almost.

Glancing over reviews at goodreads and Amazon, there are two extremes:

You have these:

"These books are awesome! The characters! The drama! The writing! And Lymond--we love him! So much!"

and then you get these:

"Too much Latin! And French! And Spanish! And whatever else Lymond babbles in. Also, too confusing! Too many peoples! WHAT IS GOING ON."

And really I have to say that for the most part I totally agree with both view points. There are so many characters and so much happens that I will say right here and now that I only sort of mostly understood everything that happened. At the beginning of this third attempt I just said, "Okay, I will not understand everything but I'm just gonna keep reading." Which is not my usual way of reading. I like to go back and make sure I undertand, and re-read to find all the pieces and put them together. And it's frustrating to me that I know that I can re-read this book and still alot of the things will go over my head. Because there were so many characters there were a few times where I said, "Oh, wait, this was the guy who did THAT at the beginning of the book? TOTALLY didn't make that connection."

I like being allowed to feel smart as a reader, not be made to feel dumb.

However.

Especially in the end, I was loving it. Oh, Lymond. And, just out of curiosity, exactly how old IS Lymond, anyway? I got it that he's very young ("Does he know how old you are?" etc.) but does it actually tell his age and that was just one of the many things I let fall by the wayside? Or was it purposely brought up and dropped to make the reader wonder (with the implication that he is Quite Young)?

But I digress--I'm talking about how much I did like the book. (Even on the first two attempts I was enjoying it, and interested in the plot and characters, I was just frustrated by everything that I wasn't picking up.)

***SPOILERS START HERE***

I loved how we gradually came to believe that maybe the original picture of Lymond was not at all true. His gradual narrowing-down and approach to the man who could prove his innocence was torturous--and the blank pages! And, and Christian! Why?

The thing that most annoyed me plot-wise was the whole card game to win the papers. More than anything else in the story, that seemed very contrived to me. Lymond is on trial, the papers have been miraculously located, and--nope! you can't have them! hahahah! AAARGH DIE IDIOT CARD PLAYER WHOM I HATE. DIE DIE DIE!

***END OF SPOILERS***

But the end! Like, the last hundred pages or so. So good!

You know, I think I finished it too recently to talk about it more coherently than this. Ah well.

And one more thing I really loved: finding the original of another MWT tribute, especially since it inspired some of my favorite lines of KoA.

"I really can't go on apologizing. It would be too monotonous."

:D:D:D