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Incredible, this is the next book in my Discworld re-read anyway! I'm in.
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Dec 4, 2021 19:46
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 18:43 |
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I'm coming at this book from a strange place. I've been re-reading certain Guards and Death books for a while now, hitting what I remember as the highlights: Guards, Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Night Watch for the guards, and Mort, Reaper Man, and Thief of Time for Death. Other than Thief of Time, I haven't read these since college, so my experience of Hogfather so far has been like hearing a story your parents used to read you once a year at Christmas, but which you haven't heard since you were nine. It feels right somehow, especially with Nigel Planer as the voice of Death: the man has his faults (and should be banned from voicing Asian characters forever), but his Death is top-notch. Early thoughts, unsorted from what my audiobook player tells me is 23% in: The Death storyline in Reaper Man is probably my favorite Terry Pratchett thing, and Death in Hogfather is (so far) way more of a gag character than he is in Reaper Man, but god he's funny. He's really earnestly trying, you know? I think in the future, when I need to explain "Lawful Neutral protagonist," I'll point to Pratchett's Death: he knows the rules better than almost anyone, and he considers them broadly worth upholding because he also knows why the rules of the cosmos are the way they are, and what the consequences of breaking or subverting them can be. But he also knows what laboring under those rules - like, say, mortality - can be like, even if it's mostly from an academic perspective, and when to use the system to correct an imbalance, and when to step outside of it entirely. Teatime - ahem, Te-ah-tim-eh - is a nightmare, and may be Pratchett's most unsettling antagonist outside of Carcer, and Carcer is a Joker expy so he barely counts. The idea of a child sitting up at night thinking about how to murder all the mythic holiday beings is both profoundly creepy and also something you can imagine an actual sociopathic child doing. I'm a bit past the point where his crew is rampaging through the tower, and starting to remember how much worse that side of the storyline gets, but vaguely enough that all I'm getting are flashes of imagery and a sense of looming dread. Finally, that Annotated Pratchett page is a godsend, and also clued me in to the fact that Terry Pratchett did... Nuclear power industry journalism??? And never wrote a book about it because he thought people wouldn't believe it. I desperately want to take a jaunt through L-Space to find the timeline where Terry Pratchett was writing about the nuclear industry circa Three Mile Island: imagine the dry, scathing, observational humor of, say, Small Gods being applied to government-run industrial systems in disarray. Kestral fucked around with this message at 10:06 on Dec 9, 2021 |
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Dec 8, 2021 20:49
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anilEhilated posted:You could try The Leaky Establishment by David Langford, Pratchett wrote the foreword to it and basically described it as the nuclear book he would have written in it. It's nuclear weapons research rather than power and if you don't mind the Britishness of the humor, it's absolutely hilarious. Sold, putting this on the reading list immediately. I just got to the mall Santa / Miracle on 34th Street scene, which I had completely forgotten. It's rare that books make me laugh out loud, but that part got me a couple times. Pratchett doesn't write children who are true to life, but they ring true on a certain level, don't they? Same as the rest of his characters, come to think of it. Kestral fucked around with this message at 10:06 on Dec 9, 2021 |
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Dec 9, 2021 03:13
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Bilirubin posted:Nice not-spoiler tags, but it is in the OP too so lol for anybody that cares for such things (note I do not) Oops, that's what I get for rushing out a post during lunch. Fixed the tag.
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Dec 9, 2021 10:06
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Rand Brittain posted:Looks like the audiobook is out on Audible UK, but not anywhere else yet. Interested to see reviews of it. It looks like this one has multiple narrators, so there's a separate actress for Susan's segments. Oh hell yes, I thought that was coming out next year! I'm exactly halfway through the old audiobook, but I think I'll switch over to the new one and give it a try for comparison's sake. The full-cast audio of Thief of Time has a special place in my heart, for all its rough edges. Blackstone Audio also did an excellent full-cast version of Ender's Game with some of those same narrators.
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Dec 11, 2021 07:34
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Meaty Ore posted:I liked the book overall, but I really would have liked to have see more of Death, more of the thieves, and less of the university faculty's wacky hijinks. The latter just takes up way too much space in the narrative without moving it forward much or having a lot of relevance to the main plot. Agreed, for some reason Unseen University / wizards tend to be around a lot in Death novels, and they always overstay their welcome: Reaper Man is a particularly egregious example of this, where you have a Death short story that is a contender for the best thing Pratchett ever wrote, stapled to an interminable (and much longer) novella about Unseen University versus animate shopping carts. Finished Hogfather today, despite planning to linger with it until Christmas; that last section flies, doesn't it? Something that I couldn't quite figure out from the last major scene: Why didn't Susan just step outside of time to deal with Teatime? They're back in the world, her powers work here, and she clearly has enough presence of mind to plan out how to kill him. I could see the "wants to minimize the use of her powers" argument, since that was her conflict throughout the book, but by the end she seems to have come much more to terms with her dual nature (that's certainly the case in the next book in the series, Thief of Time), and she's used her powers with much less provocation even earlier in the book. Thoughts?
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Dec 20, 2021 03:33
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 18:43 |
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Has BotM done The Once and Future King yet? That's always felt like a depths-of-winter book to me.
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Dec 25, 2021 09:55
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