Open your eyes and then open your eyes again.
The Wee Free Men is a wonderful book. It’s the Witches again, done YA this time around. It follows the story of Tiffany Aching–young witch to be–as she begins to discovers her powers and finds that the world may be just a bit more complicated than she (or the adults around her) thinks it is.
The turtle moves.
Small Gods is a bit odd in the greater Discworld universe, being one of only a handful of one-off stories (Pyramids and Amazing Maurice are the other two if you count the Industrial Revolution subseries as a series) and being relatively early in the reading order. So with the exception of offhand references (such as to the Great God Om), it’s one of the books you could easily read anywhere in your reading order.
“You want to know why we’re the ones responsible?" Gunny asked.
I looked up into a pair of wise eyes that had seen far more than mine.
“Because there’s nobody else,” he said.
In Going Postal, Moist von Lipwig rebuilt the post office. In Making Money, he took on the banks. Now? Steam engines are coming to the Discworld!
On one hand, it’s interesting to see more and more technology come to the Discworld, especially watching it blend with the magic that’s already there. You have goblins running the clacks (telegraphs) and now the trains and a engine that might just be alive. On top of that, we’re dealing with some of the fall out of the recent (bookwise) war between the Trolls and the Dwarves.
In the continuing stories of Bobby Pendragon, this time around he has to save the ocean Territory of Cloral. It’s a fascinating world, where at some point in the long past, the world flooded such that everyone now lives in floating cities. They have all sorts of neat water based technology and what seems like a pretty peaceful, fun loving society. Of course things are about to go wrong.
Plotwise, things seem mostly straightforward. There’s a lost city (Farr; which of course turns out to be real ), pirates, and an ‘accidental’ plague (oh! the horrors of GMO foods!). Nothing super surprising, but still enough tension to pull you through the book.
It was sad, like those businessmen who came to work in serious clothes but wore colorful ties in a mad, desperate attempt to show there was a free spirit in there somewhere.
In Going Postal, ‘former’ conman Moist von Lipwig rebuilt Ankh-Morpork post from the ground up… but now he’s bored. Everything is running as it should; there’s nothing left to fix. So when Vetinari offers him the chance to do the same to the bank… of course he runs the other way. One thing leads to another though and eventually the Moist ends up with a new dog who just so happens to own the majority share in the bank. Good times.
I know I’ve read The Merchant of Death / the Pendragon books before, but it’s been long enough that I couldn’t even say for sure when. It might have even been back when I was the same age as the eponymous protagonist Bobby Pendragon rather than more than twice that. I think I enjoyed it quite a bit though, so worth giving it a chance to reread.
On the plus side, the main characters were well enough done for the most part. They all felt distinct and for the most part felt real. The main counterpoints to that is the ‘big bad’ of the book Saint Dane–you can almost hear the mustache twirling and mwahahaing–and the ’little* bad’–an overweight caricature of the ‘corrupt queen’, constantly eating and laughing at the slaughter
At the time of writing this, Going Postal is tied for the second highest rated Discworld book on Goodreads (tied with Men at Arms at 4.37, behind Night Watch at 4.48). There’s a reason for this…
Essentially, Going Postal takes a small pile of topics–technical innovation and traditional technology versus the new hotness; conmen and businessmen; the postal service itself–and squishes them together with the wonderful latter book Discworld flair Pratchett is so known for.
We become Grimnoir in order to become heroes, to sacrifice our lives in the pursuit of a higher cause, to defend the defenseless . . . I’ve found that means attending a lot of funerals.
Hard Magic was a magical detective / spy story. It was a lot of fun, but there were only a few hints of the bigger story behind the story.