|
|
Post by Hermes on Jun 15, 2012 9:12:47 GMT -5
A couple of things I noticed - one is that the number of potential chaperones for Lemony, fifty-two, gives an interesting clue to the size of VFD in his youth. The other is that we find that the train was taking him, not to another city as you might have imagined, but to the other side of the same city. I don't think we got to see this in ASOUE; there's a trolley line, of course, and horse-drawn carriages and motor-cycles, but we only hear of trains for long distance travel, to Paltryville or the Vineyard.
|
|
|
|
Post by B. on Jun 15, 2012 9:20:47 GMT -5
I wondered if the fifty two chaperones had some connection with there being fifty-two weeks in a year. But it's probably just a coincidence.
|
|
|
|
Post by Sophie Baudelaire on Jun 16, 2012 18:12:45 GMT -5
The other is that we find that the train was taking him, not to another city as you might have imagined, but to the other side of the same city. I don't think we got to see this in ASOUE; there's a trolley line, of course, and horse-drawn carriages and motor-cycles, but we only hear of trains for long distance travel, to Paltryville or the Vineyard. Right, so now we have a better idea of the size of this city--which is apparently pretty large. |
|
|
|
Post by A on Jun 17, 2012 6:53:10 GMT -5
I only just read the excerpts, and was, I must say, pleased beyond my expectations. I am glad that WCBATH is almost a separate work to ASOUE, not at all like a companion. I am now satisfied with Seth's drawing, though I disliked it at first, like million of others.
It might not be a coincidence at all, but of significant importance. ASOUE has surprised us with seemingly unimportant things becoming of great importance, like how LS casually mentions the sugar bowl in TCC. ____
~~~~~
I will read chapter 2 in more detail tomorrow, as mother is yelling at me to go to bed.
|
|
|
|
Post by Hermes on Jun 17, 2012 14:11:32 GMT -5
It has just struck me that, if he sticks to the pattern of thirteen chapters per book, there will be fifty-two chapters in the series. It's a useful coincidence that it is also the number of weeks in a year (and of cards in a standard pack of cards). I wonder if we will get more 'fifty-two' references as we go along.
|
|
|
|
Post by Christmas Chief on Jun 17, 2012 14:31:10 GMT -5
There are seventeen pages in this chapter, and fifteen in the last. If we postulate sixteen pages for each of the remaining chapters, we arrive at 208 pages for the total book. Not an unreasonable length for a novel, and not so far off from bookseller websites' estimates. There apparently won't be a prologue, but we might still make room for some sort of epilogue, or a Kind Editor letter equivalent.
|
|
|
|
Post by Dante on Jun 17, 2012 14:50:35 GMT -5
There are seventeen pages in this chapter, and fifteen in the last. If we postulate sixteen pages for each of the remaining chapters, we arrive at 208 pages for the total book. Not an unreasonable length for a novel, and not so far off from bookseller websites' estimates. There apparently won't be a prologue, but we might still make room for some sort of epilogue, or a Kind Editor letter equivalent. Listings for the Egmont edition, funnily enough, do give a page count of 208... but for the LBC edition, it's 270. I'm sure the final products will have the same page count, though; it's just an illustration of how you can't rely on web listings. As for the chapter count, I was thinking for a while that there wouldn't necessarily be thirteen as the series no longer has a thirteen motif. But having thought about it, if the chapters are still numbered, our expectations from ASoUE will be that the chapter numbers are important; for that reason, maybe there will be thirteen. Also, two hundred and eight pages is kind of short, but that depends on how large the font is in relation to ASoUE. |
|
|
|
Post by Christmas Chief on Jun 17, 2012 16:00:27 GMT -5
160 words per page according to my earlier calculations, with just about the same for ASOUE. So, with thirteen chapters, it'd be a little shorter than TRR.
|
|
|
|
Post by Dante on Jun 17, 2012 16:07:53 GMT -5
Reason to hope that the final page count is nearer 270 than 208, then; he's not obliged to write chapters that are all roughly the same length, although the observation is perfectly reasonable. Might be interesting to do a chart of chapter lengths in ASoUE, like my chart of book lengths.
|
|
|
|
Post by Christmas Chief on Jun 17, 2012 16:28:33 GMT -5
I do have a chart, actually. Give me a moment and I'll post it.
|
|
|
|
Post by jman on Jun 17, 2012 17:14:41 GMT -5
Does anybody else find that the girl in the middle of the illustration, looking around and holding up her watch, looks a bit like Violet? Her face especially? It might indicate that the person is Beatrice...
|
|
|
|
Post by Kensicle on Jun 17, 2012 17:28:47 GMT -5
... Beatrice - who, it seems, is the illustration in that full-page picture. |
|
|
|
Post by Christmas Chief on Jun 17, 2012 17:49:33 GMT -5
Yes indeed. Interesting she should star in one of the illustrations, when she's in fact been mentioned just a few times. Could she play a larger role than we imagined? Here is the graph of chapter lengths. It's rather crowded, but technically a bar graph is the best way to represent these sets of values. I think I might upload the books individually later. Edit: My, that graph is not crisp at all. I'll work on that. In the meantime, some observations: The chapters have a high of 47 pages in TSS, and a low of 4 in TCC. The range, then, is 43 pages - quite a discrepancy, but bear in mind the extremes are outliers anyway. The length of chapters correlate to the length of the book, unsurprisingly, meaning the longer the book the longer each chapter. If you add all the pages with text and divide by 13 twice, you arrive at an average of 19 pages a chapter. The highest discrepancy between chapters within a given book was 33 pages in TSS, which means, using shaky logic, we might expect ATWQ chapters to have up to a 33 page disparity. If we assume 13 chapters with 270 pages total, the remaining eleven chapters should average out to 21 pages each. |
|
|
|
Post by Dante on Jun 18, 2012 2:13:27 GMT -5
Sherry Ann, would it be possible to do a version of that graph that arranges the chapters by book rather than by number? (Also, write up an analysis of some sort and I'll happily put it in Conflicting Conjectures.) (And maybe you could colour the books according to their spine colour, or near offer?) But either way, I think what we get from this is that even within a single book, and ignoring obvious outliers like the four-page chapter in TCC, there can be quite a range of chapter lengths. That's a relief.
|
|
|
|
Post by Hermes on Jun 18, 2012 8:14:51 GMT -5
Have we ever seen a picture of Beatrice before?
I'm not sure, thought, that the picture of her does mean she will play a larger role. It would be very Helquist-like to base an illustration on something just mentioned in passing, and almost irrelevant to eh main plot.
|
|
