Author: katenepveu

I am skipping to the next Discworld re-read book, Guards! Guards!, because I have only a few minutes before the Pip wakes up and I have only two things to add to my older post and Becca’s observations:

One, from now on, I will probably never stop wanting to immediately re-read Night Watch after this book to try and reconcile them, but I will most likely never actually do it because my brain isn’t good at that kind of extrapolation.

Two, literally one paragraph after the one containing this footnote,

The pronoun [him] is used by dwarfs to indicate both sexes. All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.

Carrot refers to the dwarf with whom he had an understanding as “she” and does so consistently throughout the book. Whee, heteronormativity. (Something the series has recently gotten better about, though.)

(See also Modern Love by Penknife.)

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It’s kind of a mixed blessing that Wyrd Sisters was up next in the Discworld re-read. On one hand, it’s the first of the Discworld books that I felt like I would wholeheartedly recommend as a starting place for someone new, so it was welcome reading. On the other, I read it in the hospital while recovering from the birth of our second child by C-section (who is currently asleep across my left arm and lap as I type on my netbook perched on my knees), which means I was not in any state to note anything useful about it other than “hey, that was good.”

(I had thought that I also read a Witches book, Lords and Ladies, when in the hospital after our first child, but on checking the relevant entry, I only brought it with, and did not re-read until we were home.)

In a sign that I am still not fully adjusted, I’d completely forgotten that I re-read Pyramids, the next book in the series, also relatively recently, until I checked the index looking for the link above. Beyond what I said there, what I noticed this time is the extent to which Pyramids is a precursor to Small Gods, what with the gods walking around and the parody of classical Greece—I think some of the philosopher jokes may even reappear. Which is interesting from a series-development perspective, but unfortunately Pyramids does not do well by the comparison.

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I remembered exactly three things about Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery, which was up next in the Discworld re-read (it was a brain-rest between reads of The Sacred Band, the last Acacia book): it was a Rincewind book, it was about the eighth son of a wizard, and it was a Dungeon Dimensions plot. Which is to say, almost nothing.

Turns out, I’d even forgot that we didn’t own it; I must’ve thought so poorly of it that I didn’t pick up a UK paperback when I was building my library on a London study-abroad. (For those buying Pratchett in ebook now: the edition I bought is by Transworld Digital, is apparently a re-issue, and is definitely nicer than the HarperCollins ones that the NYPL has.)

At any rate. My memory was accurate enough as far as it went, though there wasn’t very much Dungeon Dimensions relative to the rest of the book (which is good because as mentioned before, not my thing). But there were four things I hadn’t remembered which it seems worth noting now:

First: holy cliffhanger, Batman. How did I forget that?!

Second: Lord Vetinari is named as the Patrician here, and is basically himself though not present very much.

Third: the portrait of the wizards here is kind of peculiar. On one hand, here is our introduction to Unseen University:

A kind of spring had even come to the ancient University itself. Tonight would be the Eve of Small Gods, and a new Archchancellor would be elected.

Well, not exactly elected, because wizards didn’t have any truck with all this undignified voting business, and it was well known that Archchancellors were selected by the will of the gods, and this year it was a pretty good bet that the gods would see their way clear to selecting old Virrid Wayzygoose, who was a decent old boy and had been patiently waiting his turn for years.

The Archchancellor of Unseen University was the official leader of all the wizards on the Disc. Once upon a time it had meant that he would be the most powerful in the handling of magic, but times were a lot quieter now and, to be honest, senior wizards tended to look upon actual magic as a bit beneath them. They tended to prefer administration, which was safer and nearly as much fun, and also big dinners.

And then there’s the first time we see a group of wizards:

Another reason for the general conviviality was the fact that no one was trying to kill anyone else. This is an unusual state of affairs in magical circles.

The higher levels of wizardry are a perilous place. Every wizard is trying to dislodge the wizards above him while stamping on the fingers of those below; to say that wizards are healthily competitive by nature is like saying that piranhas are naturally a little peckish. However, ever since the great Mage Wars left whole areas of the Disc uninhabitable, wizards have been forbidden to settle their differences by magical means, because it caused a lot of trouble for the population at large and in any case it was often difficult to tell which of the resultant patches of smoking fat had been the winner. So they traditionally resort to knives, subtle poisons, scorpions in shoes and hilarious booby traps involving razor-sharp pendulums.

At which point I made a “huh?” face, because while these are not strictly, literally inconsistent, well, they really sit very oddly together.

(Becca suggests, in a post with book-destroying spoilers, that this tension is deliberate, which I think is plausible yet poorly-managed if so.)

Fourth: the narrative travels to Klatch, which at this point is fantasy cliche Arabia (caliphs, evil viziers, magic carpets, slave markets, etc. etc.). It didn’t strike me as awful as opposed to eyebrow-raising, but this is an area where my antennae for problematic things here are not as finely tuned. In any event, I look forward to Jingo, which has to be an improvement.

Anyway. Has some good bits, but very minor Discworld.

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Continuing the Discworld re-read; I missed posting about Equal Rites in time for Becca’s post, but I am ahead on Mort!

I don’t have much to say about Equal Rites, having re-read it moderately recently. In relation to the first two books, Cutangle feels way more like Ridcully than I’d remembered; Unseen University isn’t anywhere near the complex institution it will be yet, but in this and the next book, there are hints of its direction. (Institutions are a big thing in later Discworld books, and it’s interesting to see the starts toward that.) But, basically, my reaction to Equal Rites: Dungeon Dimensions plots still not my thing, and I desperately want more Esk than we have had to date.

Mort surprised me because I’d forgotten that we start “Death goes human” plots this early; as much as I love Hogfather, I wouldn’t have thought the series could sustain so many of those stories. (Maybe it can’t! I guess I’ll find out.) It feels very Discworld in its characters, but its ending strikes me as remarkably weak and unsatisfying—not just the blatant plot handwave but Death’s reaction that sets up the final confrontation. I liked it pretty well until then, though.

Finally, this is the first major-character romance in Discworld and it is as non-emotional to me as every other one until Unseen Academicals. (I originally wrote “unconvincing,” which this one is, but later ones I don’t find implausible, they just don’t create any emotional reactions in me.)

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Becca is re-reading Discworld one book every two weeks, which sounds like a good plan to me. She started with The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic together, which surprised me because I’d forgotten just how much of a cliffhanger Colour ends on. From this you can tell that I read these back in college when I first binged on Discworld and possibly not since.

I’m kind of amazed I made it past Colour, actually: I must have gotten a big stack out of the Boston Public Library and been warned that the first wasn’t very typical. Because wow, it really is not: it’s a series of pastiches/parodies of very specific things, and even the one of something I recognized (Pern) just was not my kind of thing. And yet Light, despite being as direct a sequel as possible, feels more or less like a Discworld book! Besides the things Becca points out, Light introduces the seeds of Mort, two books down the line, and Hogfather, a full eighteen books later. And of the two characters who were most jarring, Death stops being mad that Rincewind keeps cheating death and learns the card game bridge, and the Patrician (who can’t possibly be Vetinari, no matter what Pratchett has said extratextually) does not appear at all.

A very peculiar duology and only the place to start if you’re a completist (though I would be interested to hear how Light reads as a starting place, since I don’t think you really need to know much from the prior book to understand the action).

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