Welcome, book lovers! Let's talk about The Amulet of Samarkand, shall we? (If you want to talk about Monstrous Regiment or The Golden Compass/Northern Lights, click the name to go to the appropriate thread.) Before we begin, though, a few guidelines, if you don't mind? Well, even if you do, guidelines it is! All posts after this one are fair game for untagged spoilers. The assumption is that you'll acquire the book, read it, and come back to talk about it once you've read it. That might not be for a few weeks, and that is totally fine. If you're have a hard time finding the book, or want to talk about the rules or selection or problems or anything else not related to the content itself, bring that over to the main Bookclub Thread. We'll help as best we can. Same with if you think these guidelines aren't useful, they can be changed! You can totally post in here without being done, though. Just scroll all the way down and write out your thoughts if'n you want to liveblog them. (Please let us know where you are so we don't reply/tag you and spoil things unintentionally if you care about not being spoiled.) Ignoring this thread until you're caught up might mean missing alerts. That's totally okay. You can find it in the forum browser or in your list of Watched Threads (if you're watching it). You can participate in as many of the Bookclub threads as you want, in whatever order you like. The idea here is to provide discussion and encouragement in a way that lets everyone have the best reading experience we can manage. I hope those aren't too stringent, we can edit them as we need to, but since we're doing three books at once we can't really parcel them out section-by-section, not everyone will be reading them all at once, it may take people time to find some of the books, and some people read at very different paces.
Spoiler: Spoilery Tumblr-Themed Comment currently thinking about: bartimaeus doxxing nathaniel on tumblr
@MintyJojo 'cause they said they weren't aware of the bartimaeus fandom peeps on kintsugi and so, yeah... figured they might be interested in the forum's sole bartimaeus-focused thread.
Well consider me delighted! Who wants to talk about how Queezle deserved better, how Jakob deserves more attention or how cool Faquarl is? ...Bartimaeus is okay too. I guess.
haha, bart's my fave of the series (snarky asshole/assholeish djinn/genies are my weakness, haha) but... man, i love the way you worded that. :D love.
I really just love all of the spirits, even the ones that barely show up. Like all the other spirits who were part of Khaba's merry gang in ROS? Love those guys. I am particularly fond of Chosroes. It's interesting seeing spirits interact with other spirits is what I am saying.
oh my other people read the Bartimaeus Trilogy? (series? did it get a new name after Ring of Solomon came out?) Queezle. Yes please. Even tiny me (I first read the series when I was twelve or so) was rather disappointed that she was relegated to "sort-of-love interest, then dead, oh no" =/ It does its job in showing how little most magicians care about whether or not spirits die, but... did it have to be one of the only (if not the only? It's been a while, I should reread) feminine-leaning "good guy*" we see in canon? *I'd say "protagonist," but as she wasn't really central to the plot... YES. Spirit shenanigans are right up my alley-- heck, before RoS came out Ptolemy's Gate was my favorite, just for A) the glimpses we got into the Other Place and B) Nouda and the various other demons we got to see come through.
Man, the author isn't much help there too. "I do think Queezle is dead. Mind you, we never saw the body" hahaha don't play with my heart like that. Well, at least he regrets his life choices. "I feel a bit sorry that I killed her off so fast; she is an interesting character." Good on ya JStroud. Good on ya. Yeeeees same, though of course Golem's Eye was pretty high up there for me because that's when Kitty Jones really starts to become her own character, and it's great. I feel like one of ROS's only flaws is that because it focuses so much on the spirits in terms of the humans, they really lose out on a lot, but it works out either way. Ugh, Khaba and Ammet though. Such good villains. Such hilarious throwbacks (throwforwards?) to Ptolemy. They were like Ptolemy and Bartimaeus's relationship gone horribly wrong. I really want to know more about them.
Reading for the first time, and is anyone else pining for a crossover with Demon: The Descent? They would go together so well. Also, Bartimaeus is the most snark, the footnotes are amazing.
@albedo: I've never actually read that book before! I'm guessing it's good though; another to add to the shelf at some point I guess.
@MintyJojo Yeah, it's one of the World of Darkness roleplaying books that @Starcrossedsky mentioned over here: https://kintsugi.seebs.net/threads/wod-related-chattering.237/#post-3700 They linked a dropbox account that has it, and I'm really enjoying it so far. :D Briefly, it's about demons who once were loyal servants of an inhuman, amoral machine God, who acquired free will, and now pretend to be human in order to hide from God's wrath. It's heavily influenced by Cold War spy dramas, lots of intrigue and coded letters and such. Lots of discussion of the interaction between humans and demons; demons are very like humans, but also very inhuman because of their origin, and consider themselves sort of beyond or beside humanity, not a part of it. Lots of focus on petty jockeying for power, which makes both humans and demons oblivious to the greater threat. So... seems like there are some similar themes, but with reversed social roles for the demons and humans. Seems like in Bartimaeus, it's normative for the demons to act as the backdrop for human behavior - if demons weren't there, they'd do the same power jockeying, but by different means. And in Demon: The Descent, it's normative for the humans to act as the backdrop for demon behavior - human society is the setting and the constraints in which demons operate as the active protagonists. Idk, possibly not explaining well, but. Demons! Demons are neat. :D
@albedo: Hey wow, thanks for sharing! Man, that really does sound like it would make for an interesting au. Granted, the only hitch would be how much Bartimaeus and other spirits in the book dislike being referred to as "demons" in the first place, but that element could also be incorporated, I think.
@MintyJojo Happy to share the squee, I'm really enjoying both. I'm reading them both at the same time, so it's on the brain. Definitely, though. Demon: the Descent says explicitly that the human mythology about a perfect, loving God and evil, rebellious demons was deliberately constructed by the God-Machine in order to promote its own agenda. So it would rather make sense for 'demons' to reject that morally charged label, although it hasn't come up yet in the WoD book. Hmm.
HELLO YES YOU MENTIONED NDEMON AND I HAVE COME even though I didn't read the book, ah, whatever, spoilers never bothered me anyway. I love WoD crossovers I encourage them in literally every medium. @MintyJojo Each demon's feelings about the word is personal, in part because it's used for several different creatures in the WoD. Their own name for themselves is the Unchained.
@albedo, @Starcrossedsky, thanks! Wow, this definitely could work as an au, I'm seeing it right now. Also, the "Unchained" is definitely a cool self moniker to have.
Just dredging up an old thread to spread around this masterpost for the bartimaeus trilogy, if anyone wants to participate in fannish activity off this forum!
