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I've read my copy of Night Watch so often that the back pages have started falling off. Now the book ends right before the graveyard bit 
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Nov 26, 2012 14:50
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Tartarus Sauce posted:Just finished Nation. drat, this may be my second-favorite Pratchett book now (Good Omens being the first)! I think it's my favourite non-Discoworld book he's written, even over Good Omens - if only because the only bits of GO I liked were the Aziraphale and/or Crowley scenes. The Adam, Anathema and Witch-hunter bits were a bit meh to me. If I had to list a negative of Nation, it's that Daphne and Mau don't spend enough time together alone on the island, before other people start coming to it.
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Nov 27, 2012 00:05
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Actually, my fingers said Good Omens, but my brain meant Small Gods. Brain fart! Though, Omens is definitely up there on my short list--but, I agree with you that I always tend to skim the non-Crowley/Aziraphale scenes, because everyone but them is pretty meh. Hogswatch is certainly on my short list, as well. I have yet to read Night Watch. Yes. Chastise me now.
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Nov 27, 2012 02:14
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Hastur and Ligur lurking in a graveyard with enough sullen menace left over for a solid burst of lurking. Shadwell. Shadwell. 
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Nov 27, 2012 02:38
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Tartarus Sauce posted:I have yet to read Night Watch. Yes. Chastise me now. Chastise? No. Envy you getting to read it soon for the first time? Yes. It's pretty fantastic. Easily my favorite of his, and Pterry's written a lot of pretty solid stuff.
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Nov 27, 2012 02:50
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Tartarus Sauce posted:Hogswatch is certainly on my short list, as well. Meh. I prefer Reaper Man myself; as much as I like Susan and the books she's in, Death coming to grips with, well, life and the concept of an end to that, as well as his plea to Azrael at the end: WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN? Just makes me  everytime I read it.And nth-ing that you should read Night Watch.
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Nov 27, 2012 04:51
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Adeptus posted:It took me 15 years to figure out what reflect-sounds-of-underground-spirits* Oh my God. Thank you. That one has been bothering me forever. The thing that always makes me laugh is the series of footnotes about Glod.
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Nov 27, 2012 18:42
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Glod is one of my favourite more silly running jokes, alongside Dwarf bread.
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Nov 27, 2012 19:50
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AXE COP posted:I've read my copy of Night Watch so often that the back pages have started falling off. Now the book ends right before the graveyard bit You know they'll let you buy another copy right?
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Nov 28, 2012 02:45
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LooseChanj posted:You know they'll let you buy another copy right? I'm sure that breaks some sort of copyright law!
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Nov 28, 2012 03:11
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LooseChanj posted:You know they'll let you buy another copy right? It's a License to Print Money!!!!
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Nov 28, 2012 05:52
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Night Watch is fantastic, yes. Vimes is my favorite character by far, since Granny Weatherwax was relegated to the supporting cast (I'm totally not complaining about that, she makes an awesome supporting character for Tiff, and she'd kind of run her course). Vimes though... man, he's awesome. He knows he's a bad bad man and spends most of his life trying to do the Right Thing. He's a real bastard, but he tries to only turn it onto people who desperately deserve it. The bit in Thud where he realises they've tried to attack his family is unbelievable. And then of course he imprisons a spirit of primal vengeance inside his own head and uses it only when appropriate. Awesome.
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Nov 29, 2012 04:14
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Has anyone picked up Dodger? I'm about halfway through it and while there's definitely some hard-core Prachett-style writing in there, it's also so heavily.... British compared to the Discworld books. If it wasn't for the footnotes on the Cockney rhyming slang and the Internet as a dictionary to parse out the less obvious Britishicisms (cove means "dude", not "little body of water"), I'd be completely lost in this book. I'm enjoying it, though.
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Nov 29, 2012 18:48
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daggerdragon posted:Has anyone picked up Dodger? I'm about halfway through it and while there's definitely some hard-core Prachett-style writing in there, it's also so heavily.... British compared to the Discworld books. If it wasn't for the footnotes on the Cockney rhyming slang and the Internet as a dictionary to parse out the less obvious Britishicisms (cove means "dude", not "little body of water"), I'd be completely lost in this book. I've been listening to the audiobook, which makes it even better/more confusing. Here is a sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXzcWLp9aDk Really digging it so far.
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Nov 30, 2012 03:17
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Moist von Lipwig posted:Every year someone posts the Venturi/Selachi thing and every year there's at least a few people who haven't hears it and simultaneously have their minds blown and also grunt in physical pain from the awful Dad-joke that it is, I love it. Night Watch is by far his best book. Ironically my favorite bit isn't the social commentary but the part where young Vetinari remarks on after watching Vimes at work "I think I saw a genius at work". I now like to think that Vetinari's methodology was influenced from watching Vimes, who's methodology influenced by serving under Vetinari  .
Rhymenoserous fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Nov 30, 2012 |
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Nov 30, 2012 16:17
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daggerdragon posted:Has anyone picked up Dodger? I'm about halfway through it and while there's definitely some hard-core Prachett-style writing in there, it's also so heavily.... British compared to the Discworld books. If it wasn't for the footnotes on the Cockney rhyming slang and the Internet as a dictionary to parse out the less obvious Britishicisms (cove means "dude", not "little body of water"), I'd be completely lost in this book. precision posted:I've been listening to the audiobook, which makes it even better/more confusing. Finished the audio book and enjoyed it as well. Honestly I haven't had any problems picking up what a slang term meant when you think about it in context. I already knew the cockney rhyming slang stuff as it was always interesting/funny to me, but aside from that most things are easy to puzzle out. And of course it's more "British" as that's sort of the whole point. He meets a good amount of British history/folklore throughout the book.
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Nov 30, 2012 17:30
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I really enjoyed Dodger. I love Discworld a lot, but it's cool when Pratchett writes something else (Nation was awesome too, and Good Omens was my favorite novel when I was 16). I had no problem with the slang, but I've read a fair few English novels from that period (Dickens etc). I also read part of "London Labour and the London Poor", but got bored because I was 17 or 18 at the time. I should pick it up again.
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Dec 1, 2012 05:00
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Jedit posted:New book news: Turtle Recall (the new Companion) and The Compleat Guide To Ankh-Morpork are now out. So is the US getting screwed on all this new stuff? I cannot find these, or the short story collection through amazon. Just random re-sellers. I hate when I am not aloud to have Pratchett books.
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Dec 9, 2012 22:23
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Snowmankilla posted:So is the US getting screwed on all this new stuff? I cannot find these, or the short story collection through amazon. Just random re-sellers. I hate when I am not aloud to have Pratchett books. http://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Recall-The-Discworld-Companion/dp/0575091185 http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Screen-Collected-Shorter-Fiction/dp/0385618980 You need but to ask  [e]: Oh...okay then. That's a shame. VVV Pesky Splinter fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Dec 11, 2012 |
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Dec 10, 2012 02:50
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Pesky Splinter posted:http://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Recall-The-Discworld-Companion/dp/0575091185 Those are all resellers only. But yeah, the U.S. typically gets way less Pratchett stuff. Outside of the mainline books, very few of the "ancillaries" make it over the Pond, and if they do they're pretty short print runs.
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Dec 10, 2012 17:03
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Pesky Splinter posted:even over Good Omens - if only because the only bits of GO I liked were the Aziraphale and/or Crowley scenes. The Adam, Anathema and Witch-hunter bits were a bit meh to me. You know that Gaiman was more responsible for the Aziraphale and Crowley stuff, while Terry did more of the kids (think of them as proto-Johnny Maxwell & co)?
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Dec 10, 2012 17:52
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Yeah, I remember reading a quote about that. I keep forgetting that it was a joint project - I just mentally sort it into the "Pratchett" pile. 
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Dec 11, 2012 01:20
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The_Doctor posted:You know that Gaiman was more responsible for the Aziraphale and Crowley stuff, while Terry did more of the kids (think of them as proto-Johnny Maxwell & co)? Is that right? The only thing I remember thinking while reading it was that anything involving Anathema must have been written by Gaiman, as well obviously as any bits of random gruesomeness.
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Dec 11, 2012 18:35
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I remember hearing that Gaiman did more of the character and story planning, while Pterry did more of the actual putting-words-on-paper.
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Dec 11, 2012 23:32
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The only quote I ever remember reading was about how Gaiman and Pratchett did so much writing and rewriting together and back-and-forth planning/editing over the phone that neither of them remember who wrote what or if it's even possible to figure that out.
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Dec 12, 2012 00:48
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I remember reading that Gaiman was doing Sandman at the same time as Good Omens was being written. Terry had the free time so he did most of the writing.
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Dec 12, 2012 04:36
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Mr. Moon posted:The only quote I ever remember reading was about how Gaiman and Pratchett did so much writing and rewriting together and back-and-forth planning/editing over the phone that neither of them remember who wrote what or if it's even possible to figure that out. Probably would be this. As someone young whose sole experience with collaborative writing has been through Google Docs, it's kind of funny to read how they mailed floppy disks back and forth to each other. I can't even imagine working with that kind of latency, these days.
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Dec 12, 2012 05:05
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Redmark posted:Probably would be this. Tangential trivia, that's similar to how Final Fantasy 7 got translated for America. Seems like nothing today, but back in 1996, some barely-speaking-Japanese Square employee had to send messages to some barely-speaking-English guy in Japan. No instant messaging, no cheap phone calls, no messageboad, no skype, no google translate. They had to use early clunky text email (which obviously had no character-replacing translating software) and paper to get FF7 to America. Sort of amazing it even came out here at all, muddled as it were. So yeah, the idea of writing collaboratively in that old method is totally alien to me (and probably all of us) now.
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Dec 12, 2012 05:56
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precision posted:Oh my God. Thank you. That one has been bothering me forever. It's said in the book. Rincewind tries saying it in Twoflower's native language and comes out with Echo-Gnome-Ics. He says it's a deadly weapon.
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Dec 18, 2012 12:34
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The_Doctor posted:You know that Gaiman was more responsible for the Aziraphale and Crowley stuff, while Terry did more of the kids (think of them as proto-Johnny Maxwell & co)? The kids are a direct rip of Just William.
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Dec 18, 2012 20:48
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Finally got around to reading Witches Abroad. What a fantastic little book, Granny Weatherwax's bit in the gambling section of the book was amazing.
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Dec 23, 2012 02:03
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Flipswitch posted:Finally got around to reading Witches Abroad. What a fantastic little book, Granny Weatherwax's bit in the gambling section of the book was amazing. I thought it was horribly out of character for Nanny Ogg to be tricked by a very obvious ruse
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Dec 23, 2012 07:03
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The Candyman posted:I thought it was horribly out of character for Nanny Ogg to be tricked by a very obvious ruse Which ruse was that?
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Dec 23, 2012 09:53
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Jedit posted:Which ruse was that? Granny pretending to not know how to play Cripple Mr. Onion.
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Dec 23, 2012 09:59
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As far as Nanny knew Granny didn't know how to play Cripple Mr Onion though, at that point she'd probably never even seen Granny play cards at all given Granny's usual disapproval for Nanny's little pleasures. She knew Granny would do something of course but probably expected a bit of headology rather than Granny being a card shark.
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Dec 23, 2012 10:27
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DontMockMySmock posted:Granny pretending to not know how to play Cripple Mr. Onion. No, I mean the very obvious cardsharks
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Dec 23, 2012 10:48
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The Candyman posted:No, I mean the very obvious cardsharks Or was Nanny playing the straight guy? I know they have the conversation afterwards about how she didn't know they were card sharks, but that seems like the sort of thing Nanny would set up so Granny could save the day. Nanny does that a few times and never lets Granny know.
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Dec 23, 2012 11:04
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Whenever Granny is feeling down, Nanny screws up so Esme can save the day and Nanny can look suitably shocked. Nanny may not be the most powerful witch, but she knows all of Esme's buttons. My favorite bit of this is when Granny has to ride her broomstick all around Lancre to make them sleep for a few years.
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Dec 23, 2012 11:22
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AlphaDog posted:Or was Nanny playing the straight guy? I know they have the conversation afterwards about how she didn't know they were card sharks, but that seems like the sort of thing Nanny would set up so Granny could save the day. Nanny does that a few times and never lets Granny know. No, Nanny was taken by the card sharks. I think it's just that the sharks were good sharks, but they're nowhere near as good when they're playing Granny Weatherwax.
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Dec 23, 2012 11:32
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Jedit posted:No, Nanny was taken by the card sharks. I think it's just that the sharks were good sharks, but they're nowhere near as good when they're playing Granny Weatherwax. Yes, but I'm getting at the same thing Peztopiary was getting at. Nanny acts as a balance for Granny. Pratchett as much as says so in the Tiffany books - a witch needs other witches to keep an eye on her in case she starts cackling. Nanny often seems to bugger something up when Granny's in a bad mood. That way Granny's anger is directed at her (or Granny gets a sense of smug satisfaction that she needed to step in and be good), and disaster is averted. Tiffany observes this at one point, and in the next book, she buys Granny a kitten. She's testing to see if she can push similar buttons.
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Dec 23, 2012 13:45
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