(no subject)

[white_hart]

The thing I love most about the internet isn't the social aspect, it's the access to information. I am an insatiably curious person (which accounts for a great deal of my professional success; I generally know the answers to questions before they're asked, and if I don't I can find them out quickly because I have incredibly well-developed information gathering and processing skills, not to mention a substantial network of contacts at least one of whom might well know the answer) and being able to carry a device around with me which can quickly and easily access pretty much the entire sum of human knowledge is just amazing.

So I have had a delightful afternoon reading The Ringed Castle with my laptop in front of me looking up all the historical figures and places Dunnett mentions and following Lymond's travels on Google Maps. Though it does make the reading go a bit more slowly when I keep stopping every five minutes to consult the map and look at pictures of the place online. (And apart from the season, this picture of the river at Lampozhnya looks exactly as I imagined it from Dunnett's description. Skies that make the skies in East Anglia look like nothing at all. Wow.)

Comments

[perennialanna]

I have the two volumes of the Dorothy Dunnett Companion and recommend them very highly.

[white_hart]

I will look out for them. I wish I'd encountered Lymond when I was younger, then I would almost certainly have chosen the Early Modern option for A-Level history instead of Great Dictatorships of the 20th Century, which I hated.

[ironed_orchid]

I used google maps when reading Hild, which has pre-Norman conquest names for places in Britain, but which provided a map, so I could figure out which settlements had gone on to become which contemporary towns and cities.

[white_hart]

I haven't read Hild yet but may well end up doing much the same when I get to it. I certainly used to look places in Rosemary Sutcliff up in my parents' road atlas when I was a child. (And I love books that provide maps. I wish all books did.)

[ironed_orchid]

There is a map in Hild. But Google maps allowed me to see more detail, particularly if I switched to earth or street view.

[white_hart]

Lymond is similar; there are sketch maps in all the books showing the major places mentioned, which is useful when the names have changed over the years, or where Dunnett has used anglicised spelling (I do appreciate Google using local spellings, but it can make it harder to find places when one doesn't know what they are!). But Google has detail, and images of the landscapes that make it easier to visualise where the action is taking place.