Bookish Thoughts

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...

Thud  is another Discworld  book. I know I'm getting close to the end of the series, because this one was actually recommended to me by a coworker a few years ago. At the time we were studying a game that isn't all that dissimilar from the eponymous game in this novel, so he had picked it up without really knowing anything about the series. The game actually figures very little into the plot of the book. It appears on the fringes of the story, acting sometimes as a metaphor and sometimes as a possible resolution for the main plot. It's played between dwarves and trolls and requires quite a bit of strategy. The book mostly concerns itself with the not-so-great relations between dwarves and trolls in the main city of Ankh-Morpork. As more members of both species have immigrated to the city, tensions between them have been running higher. And with the murder of a high-ranking dwarf on eve of a bloody battle between them, things are about to boil over. It'...

It's another Discworld novel. Monstrous Regiment is the 31st book that Terry Pratchett wrote in this series. There are only 39 at the moment. I'm nearing the end of the printed books. And I think I'm beginning to leave behind some of my favorite characters. I know that I'm about to dive into Tiffany Aching's arc and meet Moist von Lipwig. There aren't any more Rincewind novels, and I don't think there are any more that prominently feature the Witches, the Wizards, or Death (though I expect all of them to show up somehow in the remaining books). In more ways than one, this felt like a transitional book. The cover art is of a different style than hat of the preceding books. Like the last book, this was less laugh-out-loud funny and more wryly amusing. Parts of it were downright sad. There were also a shocking number of typos. I'm not sure whether that's an effect of Pratchett's advancing Alzheimers (I think this fits the timeline f...

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret Terry Pratchett writes excellent vacation books. The Discworld novels are fun, funny, and light. They're quick and easy to read, but don't require too much thought. And, since Pratchett puts breaks in the text every few pages instead of dividing the stories into chapters, they're easy to consume in any size chunk you want. So whether I have an hour to hang out on the hammock, or five minutes while we're waiting for everyone to gather in the kitchen, I can dive right into a Discworld novel and not worry too much about getting interrupted in the middle of the action. The Truth  deals with the invention of the newspaper in Ankh-Morpork. William De Worde has been sending out a weekly, handwritten newsletter to a few nobles around the city who are willing to pay $5 an issue to keep up to date on the goings on of Ankh-Morpork. But when the dwarfs invent a printing press, William quickly finds out that he can print his newsletter ...

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 ...