Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into the cesspit of misinformation and racism that is X, I’ve been posting on other social media platforms – primarily Bluesky, which has massively increased in user numbers in the last year by a factor of around 10. (I’m also on Mastodon and Spoutible but have had far less luck in finding Dunnett readers on those two. I refuse to have anything to do with Facebook/Meta due to their heavy profiling and selling of user data, and their election interference and increasing misinformation.)

We’ve developed a little community of devoted Dunnett readers on Bluesky, which is growing steadily. There have been some lovely discussions and we have shepherded new readers through their first reads of the Lymond Chronicles and House of Niccolo – something I find particularly rewarding.

I created a feed there called #DunnettContent that searches for any posts that mention Dunnett or have hashtags that do, including various phrases and characters’ names that are relevant, and with a number of tweaks as we learn how exactly it works, this is now proving very useful.

Last week I was looking through my old records for something and came across some notes I made after having lunch with Ann McMillan back about 7 years ago. We’d beeen discussing many things, including ways of increasing interaction in various channels. One idea we came up with was drawing up a questionaire to use when interviewing well-known people with Dunnett connections. For various reasons, obviously including the Covid pandemic, this never quite got off the ground, but it occurred to me that it might be repurposed to use on Bluesky to help promote more discussion and get to know each other better.

So this last week I posted the first two questions, which have already had a good response, and produced some lovely memories of those first reads, and tonight, a few minutes ago, I posted the second two.

Below you’ll find these first questions and I’ll update this post each time as I post the rest of them.

If you are on Bluesky then come over and find us and join in. I’m @spiderbill.bsky.social

If not, then you can reply to them here.

Q1. When and how did you first come to read Dunnett?

Q2. Did you have anyone to talk to about them early on or did that come later?
If the latter how did you manage to begin with? (e.g. were you desperate to find someone to talk to about them, or were you happily lost/immersed in Middle French poetry, etc.)

For context for newer readers, I added this question because for the first few years of involvement when I was still a bookseller I used to get many many emails and letters that all started “I thought I was the only person who read Dunnett until I found your website”, and then said how much they longed to discuss the books with someone else. Even now, almost 30 years later I still get the occasional email in the same vein.

Again, the next two are pretty simple ones, but with lots of scope for further discussion.

Q3. Which is your favourite Dunnett series and/or book?

Q4. Roughly how many times have you read them?