New Common Knowledge: Important Books

This field would be where one enters a book that is important in what I would call the source book.

Examples:

* Herodotus's Histories plays a significant role in The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and would thus be a suitable entry. Count Armaghi carries an edition everywhere, and there's a crucial pass where the story of Gyges is read aloud.
* Edgar and Ingri Parin D'Aulaire's two books, Norse Gods and Giants and Greek Myths play a significant role in Neal Stephenson's Fall; or Dodge in Hell (Dodge purchases the books and reads them aloud to a young relative.)
* In Mary Renault's The Praise Singer The Iliad of Homer is being written down for the first time ever.

I feel like all these would work well in the comments field.

The comments field wouldn't make them available at the Work level. Something like this ("References" maybe?) was once the subject of some discussion, and I think the need was met by the Work Relationships functionality--which has since been combined with the revamped Series.

>1 themulhern: seems to call for a new Relationship characterization. Perhaps "Appears conspicuously in / Notably instances"?

The thing about this sort of relationship is that they may be sparing and significant in works of fiction, but they can proliferate like crazy in non-fiction. The granularity is a user judgement call, I guess, like Characters in CK.

"Work Relationships" currently does not work; it has no appropriate category. But I guess it could be made to.

Here’s the problem with having it as a work relationship. Those are reciprocal, and have you any concept of how long the list would be for The Iliad, or the Bible, or anything by William Shakespeare?

Is there a problem with the Iliad having a lot of "occurs in" links to it? Can someone think of another book besides the Praise Singer in which the book, "The Iliad", occurs? I can't, offhand. I guess Hamlet occurs in Hamlet, Revenge, 'cause everybody puts on the play, and has to wander around with their copy, practicing, and there must be a whole lot more instances of that kind of thing for various Shakespeare plays. And Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare occurs in Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana (it's used for a cypher). And so forth. But since the one book has to be in the other book, I don't think the occurrences are really all that frequent.

>6 themulhern: It will depend on how you interpret “occurs in”. A lot of series, especially in speculative fiction ones, have novellas and full novels which occur during a different novel/novella. And a “occurs in” sounds like something that will fit this relationship.
“occurs in” and “is important in” are very different animals.

The biggest issue as hinted/mentioned above is who and when will decide what is important? Does a heroine reading Anna Karenina enough to make the relationship? What if she then bases a major decision which changes the trajectory of this story on what she read in the book? Everyone will have their own threshold - just like with characters and locations now.

I think that a CK field of “Mentions book” will be an interesting data (add some brackets designator to separate major from minor (although that will be subjective) and we will have some greats stats to play with. :)

@AnnieMod I don't mean that definition of "occurs in". I mean that the book actually figures, just like a character, in the other book. Another example: In Brideshead Revisited the character Antony Blanche reads aloud from Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow, using a megaphone.

>8 themulhern: The point I was trying to make is that the categories must be very very clear - or people will interpret them weirdly :)

>9 AnnieMod: Got it!

Why are (once again) almost exclusively listed problems?
And not advantages, opportunities, benefits etc. and solutions.

Of course, problems, difficulties, overlaps, etc. must also be pointed out. But only secondarily.

Usually one finds then also possibilities to solve the conversion.

Approaches worth considering have already been stalled a number of times at the beginning of the discussion.

You perhaps are not aware of a small (and sadly, now dormant) group that is a perfect place for documenting just such relationships.

https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/296/Books-in-Books

>11 birder4106:

FWIW, I think this would work much better as a CK field (as indeed originally suggested) than as a work relationship.

The trickiest part would perhaps be wording it to get across @themulhern 's idea of books being significant objects in other books, rather than just ones referenced or mentioned.

There has to be roughly eleventy zillion books that mention The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but quite few were it's of significant importance to the plot.

Speaking of plot, are imagining something fiction-specific here, or would, say, a biography of Gibbon where the work looms large qualify?

>13 AndreasJ: I think Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire would be very likely to qualify in a biography of Edward Gibbon. But it would also be expected, so less interesting. If, say Tacitus's Annales were an inspiration for him and he kept a copy with him always, that would be slightly more interesting, although I guess it's pretty likely (haven't a clue, really).

(What I mean is that I can't imagine a biography of Edward Gibbon in which The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire isn't significant.)