{"id":752,"date":"2013-04-20T12:51:26","date_gmt":"2013-04-20T12:51:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=752"},"modified":"2024-01-21T11:35:27","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T16:35:27","slug":"pratchett_18-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2013\/04\/pratchett_18-20\/","title":{"rendered":"Pratchett, Terry: (18-20) Maskerade, Feet of Clay, Hogfather <\/cite>(re-read)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blowing through writing up a few more Discworld re-reads before turning to other tasks. Speaking of skippable books, as I just was with regard to Soul Music<\/cite>, I allowed myself to skip Interesting Times<\/cite> on the re-read because, seriously, a whole book of “what this empire needs is a honky”? No thank you. <\/p>\n

So next up is Maskerade<\/cite><\/strong>, which despite being another parody story, this time of Phantom of the Opera<\/cite>, feels much more accessible to me than Soul Music<\/cite>. It could just be that I like the witches better, of course. From a gender perspective (I’m speeding up the re-read now because I’m tentatively slated to moderate a WisCon panel on Discworld & gender), this book is interesting because it is much more scathing about society’s conventions when it comes to attractiveness than at least one later book (Unseen Academicals<\/cite>, which is oddly noncritical about the nascent fashion industry, as I recall). Though I’m not sure the series overall doesn’t somewhat fall prey to what it criticizes; see Becca’s spoilery post<\/a> for what I mean. <\/p>\n

Then there’s Feet of Clay<\/cite><\/strong>, which I do like for its riffs on the mystery genre (though I don’t understand how the political stuff doesn’t founder on, or even care about, the fact that out-of-wedlock children do not normally inherit titles . . . ). For future-panel purposes, this is the start of the book’s examination of gender and Tolkien-esque dwarves (whose sexes are visually indistinguishable), which gets problematic later but which works well here. <\/p>\n

Last for this entry is Hogfather<\/cite><\/strong>, which is very hard to read when it’s spring. Otherwise the only additional thing I have to say about it is something that never occurred to me to wonder: who is ruling Sto Helit? Susan was 16 when we first met her, so obviously she’s not old enough; possibly that might be true even here, where she’s a governess, but still she’s acknowledged to be<\/em> Duchess of Sto Helit, something that will drop out completely by the time she’s teaching in Thief of Time<\/cite>, when surely she must be of age. (In the book before that, someone refers to a Duke<\/em> of Sto Helit, but that might just be an error.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blowing through writing up a few more Discworld re-reads before turning to other tasks. Speaking of skippable books, as I just was with regard to Soul Music, I allowed myself to skip Interesting Times on the re-read because, seriously, a whole book of “what this empire needs is a honky”? No thank you. So next … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Pratchett, Terry: (18-20) Maskerade, Feet of Clay, Hogfather <\/cite>(re-read)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,64,15],"tags":[350],"class_list":["post-752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-discworld","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-pratchett-terry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2471,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions\/2471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}