Mod post: theme suggestions

[damned_colonial]

Please suggest themes you'd like to see covered here! Cut and paste the following into a comment:

ETA: please put your theme in the subject of your comment!

Theme:
Are you prepared to run it? Yes/No
Suggested books, if you have them already:


What does it mean to run the theme?

1. At least one month in advance, you'll let everyone know about the theme and your suggested reading for it. You need to suggest at least 3 works of fiction.
2. On the first of the month, you will post a welcome/introduction/kickoff for the theme.
3. Throughout the month, you'll take an active part in discussion of the theme.

You do not have to be an expert on the theme to run it. You just need to have an interest in it.

Comments

[holyschist]

Theme: Tudor/Elizabethan England
Are you prepared to run it? Uh, I guess, depends on when.
Suggested books, if you have them already: Fiona Buckey's Ursula Blanchard mysteries, Philippa Gregory (I find her work rather annoying and she tends to run with some weird hypotheses, but hey, discussion fodder!)...I'd have to look around for more, I think.

[cofax7]

::cough::

Dorothy Dunnett.

Also Patricia Finney, who wrote two Elizabethan thrillers as Finney and a short series of mysteries set on the Borders as PF Chisholm.

There's a ton of Elizabethan fiction, the problem is separating the gold from the dross. And finding stuff on Gutenberg.

[damned_colonial]

I found some just by digging around a little... don't know if any are any good, though.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1749
Major, Charles, 1856-1913
Title When Knighthood Was in Flower
or, the Love Story of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor the King's Sister, and Happening in the Reign of His August Majesty King Henry the Eighth

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1860
Creator Kingsley, Charles, 1819-1875
Title Westward Ho!, or, the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious majesty Queen Elizabeth

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22942
Holt, Emily Sarah, 1836-1893
Title Clare Avery
A Story of the Spanish Armada

I bet a good library search for fiction published before 1920 with the subject of Tudor England would turn some stuff up, too, which we could then hunt down on Gutenberg. I'm guessing there are heaps we'd say "oh, of course!" about, if someone mentioned them.

Incidentally, I bet Elizabethan seafaring (Francis Drake, Spanish Armada, etc) could be a theme in its own right.

[naraht]

"Westward Ho!" is pretty well known and by an important author. Also there's a town named after it. :)

[damned_colonial]

Another good sub-set of Elizabethan might be Shakespeare-related fiction. Or broaden it to Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Elizabethan playwrights in general.

[oursin]

Yes!! - that occurred to me last night after I'd switched the computer off. Alas, Antonia Forest's 2 YA novels The Player's Boy and The Players and the Rebels are fairly hard to get hold of. Both were reprinted by Girls Gone By but The Player's Boy is already OP.