Interesting Times

Interesting Times is arguably the worst of the Discworld books. Eric is my least favorite, but I think that has more to do with my lack of familiarity with Faust than anything else. I miss most of the jokes in that book. But in this one it's not so much that I miss the jokes as that they are awful and insensitive and the whole book is just a vehicle for delivering them.

The story focuses on Rincewind, which is the first sign that I won't like it. He's interesting enough in his first books, but he fails to really grow as a character at all, so reading about him gets really repetitive. This time around he gets sent to the Agataen Empire, a conglomeration of Asian stereotypes, where he is expected to lead a revolution. But absolutely no one is interested in him actually doing that.

What you end up with is a book that can't decide whether it's making fun of China or Japan because it doesn't seem to understand that there's a difference between the two. A white savior who'd rather be anywhere else nevertheless manages to save the day. But they just put some old white dudes in charge of the very system that the peasants were trying to overthrow. It's offensive and lazy and I really should have just skipped it on this read-through.

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