Bookish Thoughts

Thud!  isn't my favorite Discworld book. I'm not even sure if it would crack the top ten. But it is Pratchett at the top of his game, firing on all cylinders and weaving together a bunch of threads to create a dense, elaborate story that's so much more than the sum of it's parts. This book focuses on the contentious relationship between Dwarves and Trolls. As the anniversary of a famous battle between the two nears, tensions are running high throughout the city. Then a dwarf is murdered, the dwarves immediately blame a troll, and it's up to Vimes to get to the truth and keep war from breaking out in the streets of Ankh-Morpork. Pratchett dives into the interplay between history and myth, and the way they can inform actions in the present. He examines stereotypes and grudges and shows how they can take over and become larger than life. But this book is really about change. The way some people are so resistant to it that they'll do anything, and the small ways...

This isn't quite my favorite Discworld  book, but I'd argue that it's the best Discworld  book. This is Pratchett at his peak - tackling a timely and timeless issue with compassion and humor and forcing the reader to reckon with their own point of view. Pratchett makes excellent use of a time-travel paradox to send Vimes back to the past thirty years to mentor his own, younger self. This happens to coincide with a brutal regime change in Ankh-Morpork. No peaceful transition of power here - there are assassinations and revolutions, blood and fire, and Vimes just trying to prevent as much death as possible. On my first time through the series, this is the book where I finally fell in love with Vimes, where I finally saw what everyone else was seeing. He lays a foundation of morality for his younger self, one that will stick with him through the ups and downs (mostly downs) to come. It's a neat little origin story, one that acknowledges how much growth is still to come...

A little more than halfway through the Discworld  series, the Industrial Revolution is starting to take off. The Truth  introduces the movable type printing press, leading immediately to the invention of the newspaper (and, naturally, tabloids). It's fun to return to this novel in particular because it introduces a bunch of characters who continue to inhabit the background for the rest of the series. Reporters William and Sacharissa and their photographer, a vampire named Otto, will keep popping up any time there's something interesting going on. But this is where they first get the bug for chasing and reporting the news. The mystery at the heart of this story is actually the least interesting thing about it to me. Someone is trying to frame Lord Vetinari for murder in an attempt to replace him with a new patrician of their choosing. This is a well Pratchett returns to time and time again. But Vetinari is smarter, more resilient, and, strangely enough, more beloved than tha...

I can't figure out why I disliked this book so much the first time I read it. Well, based on the book mark that got left in it, I can understand why I might have been a little angry at the world and unable to really engage with this book at the time. But that's really no excuse. Or it could be that I can see just how pivotal this book is in the Discworld  series, now that I know everything that comes after it. There are a lot of firsts here. The clacks system begins the industrialization of Ankh-Morpork. There are tentative diplomatic relations with the dwarves and vampires of Uberwald. Pratchett infuses dwarf culture with an incredible richness and begins to explore themes of modernization and how new generations accept or reject traditions. Plus there's a perfectly vile villain. Really, though, this is one of the most solid books in the series. It caught me by surprise how every little side plot managed to tie back to the central theme. Plus it's another Sam Vimes...

Jingo was a good book to be reading during the election debacle. It may not make anything better, but it's a nice reminder that we've had these problems for a long time and we've been fighting them for a long time. I may be disappointed that we seem to be falling back on old habits rather than moving forward into a bright future. But things are better than they were, and things will continue to get better, because there are and always have been and always will be people who disagree with what apparently remains the status quo. Jingo is about war and the futility of war and patriotism and when it goes too far. It's about fighting people just because they're from a different place or look a little different and how completely stupid that is. It's about all the assumptions we make about "them" and how unfounded and false those assumptions tend to be. In short, this is a wonderful book about a lot of deeper themes that seem especially relevant in toda...

My first time through the Discworld series, I didn't fully appreciate the City Watch books. Sure, they were fun and funny. But I always enjoyed the books about Death or the Witches more. This time through, however, I'm finding new depths in the City Watch that has me falling even deeper in love with this series than I was before. Whether that's because I've matured as a reader or a person, or if I'm just catching more the second time around is hard to say. But these books more than any others have me glad that I'm revisiting this series. I think I've mentioned before that Discworld is a good series to grow with. Not grow from childhood to adulthood, like Harry Potter . They're good for your twenties, when you're figuring out what kind of adult you want to be. Pratchett's growth as a writer mirrored and informed my growth as a socially-conscious human. But I think I reached this book slightly before I had the context and vocabulary to deal wit...

Men at Arms is the second of the City Watch books in the Discworld series. My first time through the series, I wasn't as interested in the watch, at least initially. Their stories tend towards murder mysteries and examinations of socioeconomic divisions and political corruption. It took a while for them to grow on me. But this time through, I'm enjoying them a lot more. This book sees the expansion of the guard in a significant way. Thanks to the Discworld version of affirmative action, the guard has been forced to expand it's members beyond the human men it has so far been populated by. So we start off with the new recruits: a dwarf, a troll, and a woman/werewolf. It's a turning point for the Discworld. This is an early instance of change being accepted, being viewed as progress. Things are getting better. The watch becomes more effective as it becomes more diverse. The end of the book doesn't return to a status quo. Instead, the ramifications here are felt thro...

It's funny the sense memories I get with these books. I read the majority of  Guards! Guards!  lying in the bleachers of a baseball field in Arlington. I was visiting Kevin (for the first time!) and he was umpiring a game. The library in Ballston was closed, and the mall sucks, so I just read for hours. It's funny to think that I now work just a few blocks from that baseball field. To be honest, I didn't remember a ton about this book. There was a tiny, beaten down police force and a dragon and a long-lost king (both a fake one and a real one). It wasn't until much later in the series that I began to appreciate Sam Vimes as a character or really become interested in the City Watch. I just wanted more books about the witches and was tearing through the rest to get there faster. On re-read, this book is fantastic. I have more experience with Pratchett's style so a lot of the twists became obvious to me, in a fun, familiar way. It was great to go back and see the b...

Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear' Snuff has been sitting on my shelf for a while. It's towards the end of the Discworld series (only one, possibly two more after this), and I was waiting for the right time to pick it up. I'd even started re-reading the series already and was debating digging into this one around the time I got to Guards, Guards! so I could contrast Vimes at the beginning and end of his arc. But then the world went to shit, or maybe it's always been shit, but at any rate shit went down in Ferguson, MO, and I spent a lot of time reading tweets and first-hand accounts and critiques and criticisms and falling into a deep sadness. And one of the things I saw being circulated on the fringes was that quote up above. So ...

Night Watch is the 29th novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. It centers around a really fun time paradox that involves the commander of the city watch traveling back in time thirty years where he acts as his own mentor. I think the time paradox is handled really well. The book follows the idea that even if you change a bunch of little things, most of the bigger things are going to happen anyway. Once some things have been set in motion, there's nothing that can stop it. Even though Vimes changes some details -e.g., anticipating where an attack will come from - the larger events happen as he remembers them. This book wasn't as laugh out loud funny as a lot of other Discworld novels. It was certainly amusing. But it had a different feel. This book seemed deeper and more serious than the ones that came before it. It was still really gripping throughout, though. Almost moreso, since the stakes seemed a bit higher. Night Watch also gave me a much de...

Another Discworld novel! This one followed Captain Sam Vimes and The City Watch on a diplomatic mission to Uberwald where the werewolves are attempting to start a war among the dwarves. They steal the ceremonial throne just before the coronation of the new king with plans to hold it hostage unless the dwarves agree to elect a  different king, one who would deny dwarfdom to the more liberal dwarves with modern thoughts about gender and such. This was a fun detective novel with lots of twists and turns. I figured out the mystery fairly quickly, but it was still lots of fun to read. I've noticed this more and more with Terry Pratchett.  If I'm familiar with the source material (vampires, rock music, or fairy tales), then I catch on to a lot of the early clues and figure out the endgame pretty close to the beginning of the book. If I'm less familiar, then I miss the jokes and clues and the resolution of the novel comes as more of a surprise. But I like the ones ...