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owlAnother Pratchett-themed post. I only wish there were enough to do a book review every day.
I enjoyed Thud!, although it is following the trend of Watch books in getting darker and darker. the things that get me confused are the dwarfs and their politics. The deep-down dwarfs seemed different from the ones in T5E—there, they all seemed to act as grags. And how come if wiping out words is so terrible to dwarfs, the ones in T5E seemed not to object to Vimes the Blackboard Monitor, rather the reverse?
You can see that Thud! was written post-9/11. Jingo was pure politics and xenophobia, but here you get the fanatical religion. They dwarfs even want their own law in Ankh-Morpork. Like Vimes, I think that's a bad thing. I wish we could fix our Roundworld problem as well as the Koom Valley one was.
Sally's a bit of a change from Lady Margoletta as a 'good', female, vampire. (I don't think our other specimen counts, really).It's been obvious since Jingo or so that there would be a vampire in the Watch eventually, because Vimes was so set against it. The girls' night out was funny: a vampire, a werewolf, a dwarf and a pole dancer walk into a bar....Igor's cocktail names were hilarious—but he isn't really an Igor after all! Sally turning into a lot of bats, as opposed to one, was funny, as was the fact that Igor's emergency blood reconstitution thing has csught on among the Black Ribboners. It was nice to see a little more of Otto too—and Moist's cabbage-themed stamps! (Hadn't he already made them in GP?). I wonder why even Nobby bothered to steal self-combusting stamps. Sneaky of Cheery, though.
How come Fred and Nobby have been moved into the training school? In T5E, they seemed to have found a very comfortable "nitch" in Traffic. And I should think that Nobby would be the last person one should want training coppers....Nice to see Cheery being promoted, too, but she never seems to do Forensics any more. Does Igor do it all now?
I was good, as well, to see that Angua and Carrot still do things to each other's heartbeats. And, Head Banger? LOLOL!! It's a bit odd we've never heard his dwarfish name before now. do all dwarfs have double names—although Khad-bhat does sound a little like "Carrot".
The Discworld is getting more "mystic", to quote Vimes—creepy, I'd say. The Summoning Dark reminds me of a sort of parasitic small god. All the stuff with Young Sam and "Where's My Cow?" was sweet; I loved that the Watch conspired to get Vimes home on time—and Carrot closed two roads! Now I want to see the real version of "Where's My Cow?" with the Sam Vimes additions. and then it ended up being his anchor to who he was against the Summoning Dark, kind of like an internal version of the cigar case in NW. I liked the inner watchman. We've seen him (it?) in action before, but never characterised. I do hope that Vimes isn't getting too powerful, too special. No-one else has survived the Summoning Dark with their sanity intact. It would be sad if Vimes were like Granny Weatherwax, too powerful to be vulnerable, therefore no story. I'd miss him a lot.
I'm a sucker for all the workings of the Watch: the metamorphosis of A.E. Pessimal, quite touching really. Mr Boggis in the Specials—bit of a change from when Carrot arrested him! the Librarian, of course; Pongo pongo. And Willikins the fighting butler, although we did get a hint of that in Jingo when Vimes was expecting him to be slaughtered and instead he was biting Klatchians' noses off ('Just one nose, sir.') So the Watch is 'the thin brown streak', lol.
I liked Detritus looking after Brick—and he and Ruby are happy but have no pebbles, aww. He's come a long way from being a "splatter" at the Drum in MP or whenever it was.
The satirising of The da Vinci Code (what a waste of £4 that was) and the art museum (good to see it running again after ToT) curator with his terribly RP accent were both funny, and the artist who thought he was a chicken. He must have been a few tubes short of a paintbox even before he found the cube. There so many books now that Pterry can put in throw-away allusions everywhere, and if you have the right facts you'll get them, just like in a novel set in the Roundworld.
I see it's now the Year of the Prawn. What's the new Century called, Century of the Anchovy?
Anyway, Thud! was one of the best books yet, despite my confusion over dwarfish issues. I'll go and re-read it, and all I can ask is, "When is the next book?"
I enjoyed Thud!, although it is following the trend of Watch books in getting darker and darker. the things that get me confused are the dwarfs and their politics. The deep-down dwarfs seemed different from the ones in T5E—there, they all seemed to act as grags. And how come if wiping out words is so terrible to dwarfs, the ones in T5E seemed not to object to Vimes the Blackboard Monitor, rather the reverse?
You can see that Thud! was written post-9/11. Jingo was pure politics and xenophobia, but here you get the fanatical religion. They dwarfs even want their own law in Ankh-Morpork. Like Vimes, I think that's a bad thing. I wish we could fix our Roundworld problem as well as the Koom Valley one was.
Sally's a bit of a change from Lady Margoletta as a 'good', female, vampire. (I don't think our other specimen counts, really).It's been obvious since Jingo or so that there would be a vampire in the Watch eventually, because Vimes was so set against it. The girls' night out was funny: a vampire, a werewolf, a dwarf and a pole dancer walk into a bar....Igor's cocktail names were hilarious—but he isn't really an Igor after all! Sally turning into a lot of bats, as opposed to one, was funny, as was the fact that Igor's emergency blood reconstitution thing has csught on among the Black Ribboners. It was nice to see a little more of Otto too—and Moist's cabbage-themed stamps! (Hadn't he already made them in GP?). I wonder why even Nobby bothered to steal self-combusting stamps. Sneaky of Cheery, though.
How come Fred and Nobby have been moved into the training school? In T5E, they seemed to have found a very comfortable "nitch" in Traffic. And I should think that Nobby would be the last person one should want training coppers....Nice to see Cheery being promoted, too, but she never seems to do Forensics any more. Does Igor do it all now?
I was good, as well, to see that Angua and Carrot still do things to each other's heartbeats. And, Head Banger? LOLOL!! It's a bit odd we've never heard his dwarfish name before now. do all dwarfs have double names—although Khad-bhat does sound a little like "Carrot".
The Discworld is getting more "mystic", to quote Vimes—creepy, I'd say. The Summoning Dark reminds me of a sort of parasitic small god. All the stuff with Young Sam and "Where's My Cow?" was sweet; I loved that the Watch conspired to get Vimes home on time—and Carrot closed two roads! Now I want to see the real version of "Where's My Cow?" with the Sam Vimes additions. and then it ended up being his anchor to who he was against the Summoning Dark, kind of like an internal version of the cigar case in NW. I liked the inner watchman. We've seen him (it?) in action before, but never characterised. I do hope that Vimes isn't getting too powerful, too special. No-one else has survived the Summoning Dark with their sanity intact. It would be sad if Vimes were like Granny Weatherwax, too powerful to be vulnerable, therefore no story. I'd miss him a lot.
I'm a sucker for all the workings of the Watch: the metamorphosis of A.E. Pessimal, quite touching really. Mr Boggis in the Specials—bit of a change from when Carrot arrested him! the Librarian, of course; Pongo pongo. And Willikins the fighting butler, although we did get a hint of that in Jingo when Vimes was expecting him to be slaughtered and instead he was biting Klatchians' noses off ('Just one nose, sir.') So the Watch is 'the thin brown streak', lol.
I liked Detritus looking after Brick—and he and Ruby are happy but have no pebbles, aww. He's come a long way from being a "splatter" at the Drum in MP or whenever it was.
The satirising of The da Vinci Code (what a waste of £4 that was) and the art museum (good to see it running again after ToT) curator with his terribly RP accent were both funny, and the artist who thought he was a chicken. He must have been a few tubes short of a paintbox even before he found the cube. There so many books now that Pterry can put in throw-away allusions everywhere, and if you have the right facts you'll get them, just like in a novel set in the Roundworld.
I see it's now the Year of the Prawn. What's the new Century called, Century of the Anchovy?
Anyway, Thud! was one of the best books yet, despite my confusion over dwarfish issues. I'll go and re-read it, and all I can ask is, "When is the next book?"
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-01 08:24 pm (UTC)Well, sure. Int he Uberwald and the mountains, such distinctions are crucial, but to a city dwarf, any deep dwarf is a higher (lower?) class of being. It's no surprise the deep dwarves are capitalising on this.
>>>>>In T5E, they seemed to have found a very comfortable "nitch" in Traffic. And I should think that Nobby would be the last person one should want training coppers...<<<<<
Well, Fred's getting really old. Remember that he's a few years older than Vimes, and Vimes is in his what, fifties now? As for Nobby, are you going to separate the two?
>>>>>The Summoning Dark reminds me of a sort of parasitic small god.<<<<<
I SO missed that! Good catch!
>>>>>it ended up being his anchor to who he was against the Summoning Dark, kind of like an internal version of the cigar case in NW.<<<<<
And that as well! Shame on me!
>>>>>I liked Detritus looking after Brick<<<<<
It's so him, isn't it?
It's not my favourite Discworld book (Going Postal is, I'd have to say, with The Truth running a close second), but it's close. Great review!
no subject
Date: 2005-10-06 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-01 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-06 06:58 pm (UTC)Hmmm. Has Vimes ever done a good cop, bad cop before? I seem to remember something vaguely...
no subject
Date: 2005-10-01 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-06 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-02 12:53 am (UTC)I don't remember, but I'm assuming that only a year or so passed in between GP and Thud!, so Vimes could easily have been referring to events that occurred during GP.
It's a bit odd we've never heard his dwarfish name before now. do all dwarfs have double names—although Khad-bhat does sound a little like "Carrot".
I think Carrot was originally a nickname, but I guess he adopted it as his official name when he came to Ankh-Morpork. I think most Morporkian dwarf names are simply literal translations of their Dwarfish names, but I'm sure there are exceptions. Isn't there a passage in Wyrd Sisters about how dwarfs who move into the city often change their names to things like "Timkin Rumbleguts"?
What's the new Century called, Century of the Anchovy?
I think it's the Century of the Rat, as mentioned in Feet of Clay.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-06 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-02 08:15 am (UTC)I was vastly disappointed to see it starting with Vimes rebelliously shaving. Actually, that’s a lie, because I’d read the preview ‘chapter’ and done the disappointment then… anyway, it picked up a bit.
The conflict between Angua and Sally, as a second layer of unmotivated conflict inherited through the ages, yadda yadda, struck me as uncharacteristically heavy-handed.
And the Devices are a quite horrible, er, device. They make a complete mess of what little physics the Disc has. A simpler mechanism than the Cubes could have been used to convey the words of Bhrian and Diamond. Possibly this was a Da Vinci Code reference I missed on account of not having exposed myself. What’ll Ankh-Morpork do with an inexhaustible power source (the Axle)? What’s an ‘Average Bar,’ anyway?
I find it more than a bit strange that Vimes knew Carrot’s real name, but Angua didn’t.
Complaints aside… Fred and Nobby aren’t actually in training, Fred’s office is just in that building. It’s specified that he’s Custody Officer (i.e. head jailer) and head of the Specials. The Dark is rather more powerful than a small god, but certainly conceptually related. And I really like the whole A. E. Pessimal thing — clearly a case of Vetinari playing Vimes like a harp, giving him an apparent victory to compensate for the whole vampire thing. :-) And yeah, it’s a good one. Although once the novelty wears off I’ll probably list it below Feet of Clay, as well as Night Watch and The Fifth Elephant.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-06 07:14 pm (UTC)I didn't mind the Device of the cubes, but I don't see the point of the perpetual motion one. It seemed a bit tacked on to me.
Hmm. Perhaps "Head-Banger" is the sort of name that you'd make an effort to keep secret from your girlfriend?
Yes, you're right about Fred's new job. And I bet A.E. Pessimal was planned by Vetinari to the last detail.
Hello.. Let's get acquainted...
Date: 2008-10-09 05:02 am (UTC)My name is Jessika!