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

[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.

Re: US Civil War

[cofax7]

Shaara's Killer Angels? It's not entirely fiction, but it sure reads like it.

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[cofax7]

Okay, for this I think we really need some African writers. I've been getting a little antsy looking at what we're talking about here, and thinking we need some stuff from a subaltern position (that's what it's called, yes?). Also, I think veejane should be prodded to suggest some things.

[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.

Re: US Civil War

[damned_colonial]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killer_Angels calls it a historical novel. I see it's also the book that was adapted into the movie "Gettysburg". Sounds like a great choice to me!

Wikipedia has a whole category for Civil War novels, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_Civil_War_novels

Oh... DUH. Of course we have to have Gone With the Wind.

Actually, that sounds like an awesome set of books to me. Little Women (contemporary), GWTW (1939), Killer Angels (1974), March (rewriting of Little Women), The Wind Done Gone (rewriting of GWTW).

[damned_colonial]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix_in_Britain

[damned_colonial]

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

Re: US Civil War

[damned_colonial]

Oh, and, Red Badge of Courage (1895) looks like a good one.

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[damned_colonial]

Absolutely. I went digging around a bit but it's not my area so much. These look promising, though:

http://www.amazon.com/Chaka-African-Writers-Thomas-Mofolo/dp/0435902296
A fictionalised account of Chaka Zulu, pub. 1925.

http://www.amazon.com/Things-Fall-Apart-Chinua-Achebe/dp/0385474547
"One of Chinua Achebe's many achievements in his acclaimed first novel, Things Fall Apart, is his relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism. First published in 1958, just two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain, the book eschews the obvious temptation of depicting pre-colonial life as a kind of Eden. Instead, Achebe sketches a world in which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence."

Some lists of African books:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/africa/cuvl/Afbks.html
http://library.jccc.net/guides/literature/africannovel.html

I don't know veejane, but it doesn't look like she's on DW, or at least not under that name.

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[cofax7]

Vee was on that panel you attended. *g*

And yes, Achebe is worth reading--Things Fall Apart was, IIRC, written as an explicit response to Conrad.

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[damned_colonial]

Ah, excellent! Putting the pieces together, yay. Would you like to invite her over?

[oursin]

Watson was shot during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, 1878-80, ('I see you have lately been in Afghanistan') was he not? The Crimea would make him really quite a bit older than Holmes.

[oursin]

Or even better, Mary Seacole.

[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.

[jest]

Damn, you're absolutely right. Somebody at the library said Crimea the other day and I swallowed it without a second thought.

Re: Gold Rushes

[jest]

If you want to branch out "The Colour" by Rose Tremain covers the 19th c. New Zealand gold rush.

[jest]

Here's a handful of themes that I don't know enough about to run myself but would love to see covered:

Homosexuality in the 1930s

Cold War America

The Boer War

Fin de siècle Europe

18th-century Korea
(The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble wasn't very good but it sure made me want to learn more about the period.)

Imperial Russia

Egyptology in Fiction

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[gloss]

If drama counts, One Flea Spare by Naomi Wallace is *stunning*.

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[gloss]

More...
The Midnight Queen, May Agnes Fleming. Gutenberg text, late 19th-century Gothic about London's Great Plague.

[avendya]

I would really, really love to see science & technology covered. (That is, changes in attitude over time, etc.) Jo Graham's Hand of Isis touches on it, but it's more fantasy than pure historical. Cryptonomicon does some interesting stuff with codebreaking in WWII. Are biographies and/or non-fiction allowed? (Because if they are, I could do a whole section of science from 1900 - 1950.)

Re: Gold Rushes

[damned_colonial]

Ooh, excellent! I love her "Restoration" and have been trying to think of other Restoration books to suggest as a set here.

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[damned_colonial]

I was wondering about plays earlier, esp. Shakespeare so that eg. Henry V would count for the comm. I'm undecided.

Re: Plagues and pandemics

[damned_colonial]

Awesome! Thus fulfilling the Gutenberg requirement.

[damned_colonial]

So the current guidelines, which are totally open for discussion, are that you have to have three works of fiction, but can additionally suggest non-fiction, movies, TV, plays, etc. Cryptonomicon would be a good one to read, though! Maybe in a set about the Pacific theatre of WW2? I'd like to see that.

[damned_colonial]

Homosexuality in the 30s: we could read "While England Sleeps", for starters. And I've got a non-fiction rec, "Queer London", which is sitting on my "to read" bookshelf, *sigh*.

Boer War would be great as I suspect there are a range of books with different perspectives.

Egyptology, YES. Have to have an Amelia Peabody mystery in there, for starters. (I read one and didn't like it, but that doesn't mean it's not a good candidate.)