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Markovnikov posted:I recently finished reading Good Omens. Didn't really like it tho'. The first half with Aziraphale and Crowley dicking around is pretty entertaining, but then you get to Adam and the gang and the book just dies. The ending is completely anticlimactic too, Adam just wishes all the baddies away and that's it. The book is also unnecessarily dark/schizophrenic in tone, didn't need the part about people being turned into skeletons by a maggot demon in a book that makes a running gag out of the number of nipples someone is carrying around. Good Omens works a LOT better if you grew up reading Just William. Nation is the best non-Discworld Pratchett.
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Dec 26, 2014 21:03
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Markovnikov posted:I recently finished reading Good Omens. Didn't really like it tho'. The first half with Aziraphale and Crowley dicking around is pretty entertaining, but then you get to Adam and the gang and the book just dies. The ending is completely anticlimactic too, Adam just wishes all the baddies away and that's it. The book is also unnecessarily dark/schizophrenic in tone, didn't need the part about people being turned into skeletons by a maggot demon in a book that makes a running gag out of the number of nipples someone is carrying around. We'll it was co-written with gaiman, and I think you basically said you hated everything he wrote and liked Pratchett's stuff. Anyways, try Nation, it's pretty good.
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Dec 26, 2014 21:10
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That Pesky Splinter, him diamond.
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Dec 27, 2014 01:28
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rejutka posted:That Pesky Splinter, him diamond. Agreed.
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Dec 27, 2014 03:32
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I loved Nation so much. It's possibly even my favourite Pratchett. If you can get along at all with books starring teen protagonists, give the Johnny Maxwell series a try.
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Dec 27, 2014 03:33
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Trin Tragula posted:I loved Nation so much. It's possibly even my favourite Pratchett. If you can get along at all with books starring teen protagonists, give the Johnny Maxwell series a try. Only you can save mankind is now very dated
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Dec 27, 2014 09:37
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It still has some great moments though, like Johnny imagining the alien battleship having a (four-armed reptilian) tealady, because of course it would. Just assume it's trying to be retro.
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Dec 27, 2014 11:14
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thespaceinvader posted:Good Omens works a LOT better if you grew up reading Just William. Just William is: the Antichrist is the central joke of the book.
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Dec 27, 2014 13:00
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Have just finished listening to the Good Omens radio adaptation. It's pretty great - it solves some of the pacing issues I have with the book, and keeps as many jokes as possible in. No angels garvotting on pin-heads still, sorry rejutka. And no 'gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide' either. Good voice acting and some pretty great line readings also. Some pretty snazzy artwork too:         
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Dec 27, 2014 17:39
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There's a neat comic-book sequence of Gaiman and Pratchett as the police officers in the first episode too: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/5fMPYpDHBNWgxrVx4jWvz8r/the-good-omens-illustrators I really enjoyed it. There were bits missing, and a few bits where I only really worked out what was going on by having read the book before, but it was great fun. And I now can't stop picturing Peter Serafinowicz as Crowley. It works really well, actually.
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Dec 27, 2014 19:00
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thespaceinvader posted:And I now can't stop picturing Peter Serafinowicz as Crowley. It works really well, actually. I tried listening to the audiobook but Serafinowicz's voice is why I stopped. He's just too.. smooth and evil. I always pictured Crowley as more.. I don't know, sort of casual in his delivery. It's just a job for him after all.
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Dec 27, 2014 22:20
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It's a job he takes pride in doing well, see: the M25, the telephone exchanges, etc. I though Serfinowicz had jst the right level of oily vs smooth. And knowing what he looks like genuinely helped. I was thinking Cumberbatch/Freeman for onscreen Crowley/Aziraphale, I'm now thinking Serafinowicz/Freeman. God drat I want a Good Omens movie...
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Dec 27, 2014 22:59
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I'm just sad my secret hope of Mayall/Edmondson is out of the picture forever now. Just picture it, Crowley realizes there was a three-way switch and they wasted their time, Aziraphale kicks him in the bollocks and beats him over the head with a frying pan.
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Dec 27, 2014 23:06
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Let's all just admit it, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore would be best.
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Dec 28, 2014 12:44
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If you'd asked me ten years ago I would have said Fry/Laurie, but they've both got a little too old now.
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Dec 28, 2014 12:50
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Total Meatlove posted:Terry Pratchett's love of puns, bad latin, wordplay and heraldry from the novel Men at Arms, all combine together in his actual coat of arms; Motto: "Don't fear the Reaper". Hogge Wild fucked around with this message at 13:34 on Dec 30, 2014 |
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Dec 30, 2014 13:31
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Hogge Wild posted:Motto: "Don't fear the Reaper". I just know, KNOW that this coat of arms is full of puns, asides from the obvious Anhk and Morepork.
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Dec 31, 2014 00:53
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:I just know, KNOW that this coat of arms is full of puns, asides from the obvious Anhk and Morepork. The obvious ones are to do with the books, though they're a bit sad. The Big Red Book is the famous symbol of long running documentary series This Is Your Life, where the host would surprise someone (often but not always the famous) and take them to a TV studio to meet people from their past and talk about their life. The books being closed is thus closing the books on life - in other words, death. However, combined with the motto "Don't Fear The Reaper" (and to a lesser extent the ankh, symbol of eternal life) it is less giving up on life and more an acceptance that life ends. The motto also ties in with Pterry's campaigning for assisted death.
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Dec 31, 2014 02:01
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loving hell, I can't find my copy of Thud! and I was wanting to pass on the description of Koom Valley from the footsoldier's level for a landscape commission, I don't suppose I could ask someone to PM or paste the description of the scenery from the bit where Vimes is walking around with the recreated map on his head and also the bit about the coloured cork trick (spoiled since I know someone in the thread's going through the books)?
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Jan 1, 2015 06:04
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Pidmon posted:loving hell, I can't find my copy of Thud! and I was wanting to pass on the description of Koom Valley from the footsoldier's level for a landscape commission, I don't suppose I could ask someone to PM or paste the description of the scenery from the bit where Vimes is walking around with the recreated map on his head and also the bit about the coloured cork trick (spoiled since I know someone in the thread's going through the books)? There were lots of birds. Insects bred like mad in the wide, shallow pools and dams that littered the floor of the valley in late spring. Most of them would be dry by the late summer, but for now Koom Valley was a smorgasbord of things that went bzz! And the birds had come up from the plains to feast on all of it. Vimes wasn’t good at birds, but they mostly looked like swallows, millions of them. There were nests on the nearest cliff, a good half mile away, and Vimes could hear the chattering from here. And where trees and rocks had piled up in dams, saplings and green plants had sprouted. ... It looked so simple. It would have been simple if Koom Valley had been flat and not littered with rubbish like the ten-pin bowling alley of the gods. In some places, they had to backtrack, because a wall of tangled, stinking, gnat-infested timber blocked the way. Or the barrier was a wall of rocks the length of a street. Or a wide, mist-filled, thundering cauldron of white water that elsewhere would have a name like The Devil’s Cauldron but here was nameless, because this was Koom Valley and for Koom Valley there just weren’t enough devils and they didn’t have enough cauldrons. Koom Valley was…well, Koom Valley was basically a drain, that’s what it was; nearly thirty miles of soft limestone rock edged by mountains of harder rock, so what you had would have been a canyon if it wasn’t so wide. One end was almost on the snowline, the other merged into the plains. It was said that even clouds kept away from the desolation that was Koom Valley. Maybe they did, but that didn’t matter. The valley got the water anyway, from meltwater and the hundreds of waterfalls that poured over its walls from the mountains that cupped it. One of those falls, the Tears of the King, was half a mile high. The Koom River didn’t just rise in this valley. It leapt and danced in this valley. By the time it was halfway down this valley, it was a crisscrossing of thundering waters, forever merging and parting. They carried and hurled great rocks, and played with whole fallen trees from the dripping forests colonizing the scree that had built up against the walls. They gurgled into holes and rose again, miles away, as fountains. They had no mapable course—a good storm higher up in the mountains could bring house-sized rocks and half a stricken woodland down in the flood, blocking the sinkholes and piling up dams. Some of these could survive for years, becoming little islands in the leaping waters, growing little forests and little meadows and colonies of big birds. Then some key rock would be shifted by a random river, and within an hour, it would all be gone. Nothing that couldn’t fly lived in the valley, at least for long. The dwarfs had tried to tame it, back before the first battle. It hadn’t worked. Hundreds of trolls and dwarfs had been swept up in the famous flood, and many had ever been found again. Koom Valley had taken them all into its sinkholes and chambers and caverns, and had kept them. There were places in the valley where a man could drop a colored cork into a swirling sinkhole and wait for more than twenty minutes before it bobbed up on a fountain less than a dozen yards away. Eric himself had seen this trick done by a guide, Vimes read, who’d demanded half a dollar for the demonstration. Oh yes, people visited the valley, human sightseers, poets and artists looking for inspiration in the ragged, uncompromising wildness. And there were human guides who’d take them up there, for a hefty price. For a few extra dollars, they’d tell the history of the place. They’d tell you how the wind in the rocks, and the roaring of the waters, carried the sounds of ancient battle, continuing in death. They’d say, maybe all those trolls and dwarfs the valley took are still fighting, down there in the dark maze of caves and thundering torrents. One admitted to Eric that when he was a boy, during a cool summer when the meltwaters were pretty low, he’d roped down into one of the sinkholes (because, like all such stories, the history of Koom Valley wouldn’t have been complete without rumors of vast treasures swept down into the dark) and had himself heard, above the sound of the water, battle noises and the shouting of dwarfs, no sir, honestly sir, it chilled my blood so it did, sir, why, thank you very much, sir…
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Jan 1, 2015 08:12
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Thank you very much!
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Jan 1, 2015 08:35
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I'm going on holiday tomorrow and I'm gonna start Witches Abroad on the plane  Can't wait, the second half of 2014 was very devoid of Pratchett for me.
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Jan 1, 2015 13:08
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Pidmon posted:loving hell, I can't find my copy of Thud! and I was wanting to pass on the description of Koom Valley from the footsoldier's level for a landscape commission, I don't suppose I could ask someone to PM or paste the description of the scenery from the bit where Vimes is walking around with the recreated map on his head and also the bit about the coloured cork trick (spoiled since I know someone in the thread's going through the books)? A few of us are. Thanks for being spoiler free!
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Jan 1, 2015 15:56
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Can someone help me understand the Principality joke in Good Omens? I know it's British Slang and it's about being gay, but Google isn't helping.
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Jan 8, 2015 00:16
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Principality. Principality. Let the puns commence. Edit: Are we thinking of different jokes, because this one has nothing to do with being gay as far as I know? tooterfish fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Jan 8, 2015 |
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Jan 8, 2015 00:28
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tooterfish posted:Principality. I think it's a gay joke because Adam later says something about the "General principle" and Pepper asks him, "What does that got do to with May Poles?" Since "gay as a may pole" is a thing I thought she was mixing up something her parents said about gay people. tom bob-ombadil fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Jan 8, 2015 |
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Jan 8, 2015 00:45
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Haven't read the book in years, but I did a search and I think you're barking up the wrong tree there. In fact, I think you're in entirely the wrong forest. What she says is "they were just free.. thinking worshippers of the progenerative principle". It's a reference to the pagan worship of mother nature and fertility (which is "something to do with maypoles"). It's just a joke about witches being stereotyped as devil worshippers by Christian culture, probably because of the superficial similarities between Pan (big horns, hooves, likes to party) and Old Nick (big horns, hooves, likes to party). e: more tooterfish fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Jan 8, 2015 |
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Jan 8, 2015 01:16
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The passage I'm talking about is earlier than the one you quoted. This is really frustrating because my physical copy has been MIA since we moved and it's difficult to track the passage in an audiobook. I'll give it another listen at work tomorrow and get back to you.
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Jan 8, 2015 01:33
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dragon_pamcake posted:The passage I'm talking about is earlier than the one you quoted. The Principality line is from 38: quote:TECHNICALLY AZIRAPHALE was a Principality, but people made jokes about that these days. The joke is one of a couple of items. One possibility: quote:I think you missed the British in-joke about Principalities. It's not other angels that are likely to make fun of Aziraphale’s job title, but people. Around London where he lives, they're likely to answer "I'm a Principality" with "You mean like Wales?" Another possibility: quote:The Queen was visiting Scotland and Alex Salmond called in for a chat..... Similar jokes here: http://britishexpats.com/forum/barbie-92/not-so-funny-oz-joke-364691/ The maypole bit is from 187-88, relating to Pepper's mother's opinion on witches: quote:Pepper nodded amiably. “And she said, at worst they were just free-thinking worshipers of the progenerative principle.”
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Jan 8, 2015 03:08
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Thanks for the help ulmont and tooterfish. The quotes made it much clearer. I feel embarrassed I didn't get it right, but that's a pretty British joke. Is there any legal way to listen to the Radio Drama on iDevices in the U.S.? I'm trying to get my husband to listen to the book, which he has never read.
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Jan 8, 2015 23:10
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dragon_pamcake posted:Thanks for the help ulmont and tooterfish. The quotes made it much clearer. I think it comes out as CDs/MP3 downloads sometime in the next month.
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Jan 9, 2015 00:14
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Okay, I've sifted through enough horrible, painful fantasy looking for something I'd enjoy. Can anyone recommend to me some fantasy authors who are breezy and comic like Pratchett? I've tried to force myself through ASoIaF and it's like the torture porn of novels, I don't think I'll ever understand the communal obsession with grimdarkness for its own sake rather than making some thematic point. I somewhat enjoyed Sanderson, if for interesting premises more than for execution, but most other fantasy I've come across has just been...dismally bad. I am a big dumb babby and just want to read about interesting things happening in a witty way, and one can only read Thief of Time so many times.
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Jan 9, 2015 05:52
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The thing that was novel with A Song of Ice and Fire was the conscious subversion of normal fantasy storytelling. "Hey, here's the noble hero who always does the right thing! Like him? Whoops, off with his head!" And so on and so forth. It makes investing in characters more exciting because literally anyone could die at any moment. No one's got Plot Armor, and this story might not have a happy ending for the "Good Guys". Which was a fairly new thing, at least in mainstream fantasy literature....in 1996. Anyway, as far as breezy fantasy stuff, have you read the old Robert Asprin Myth books?
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Jan 9, 2015 06:01
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Panic! at Nabisco posted:Okay, I've sifted through enough horrible, painful fantasy looking for something I'd enjoy. Because in Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy someone calls a wizard a magical arsehole. EDIT: well, almost. quote:"Well, then. I would like to thank you, Captain, for the part you played in that little adventure of ours." VagueRant fucked around with this message at 08:10 on Jan 9, 2015 |
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Jan 9, 2015 07:52
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jng2058 posted:Anyway, as far as breezy fantasy stuff, have you read the old Robert Asprin Myth books? This is a pretty solid recommendation for funny light fantasy stuff.
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Jan 9, 2015 08:51
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Thanks, I'll check out both of them!
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Jan 9, 2015 18:41
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VagueRant posted:What about a combination of humour with grimdark torture porn? Glen Cook's Black Company also has a lot of dark humor in a... I don't want to call it grim or anything, but definitely a not happy setting where the characters are trying to get by. At one point the narrator gets caught writing sexy fan-fiction about his boss, who happens to be the Evil Empress sorceress of doom. It's pretty funny. I'd probably rate it as less grimdark than Abercrombie. His Instrumentalities of the Night is also really fun if you're into actual history instead of theme park history. Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora is a fun Ocean's 13 kind of heist book with some good humor in it, though the third act gets pretty serious. Still, Lynch doesn't use frak or whatever fantasy replacement swears and many of his characters are really foul mouthed, so it's pretty fun. The Wheel of Time is kinda my baseline for bog standard fantasy, but I think it's good enough and fun enough to be worth reading. Sanderson was called in to finish it up but, as you have noted, he's a better ideas man than executionist. If you want to branch out a bit into sci-fi, Ian Bank's Culture novels are actually just loving brilliant and they've got a nice sense of humor, especially with the Minds. Again, sci-fi, but Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is basically all that early Pratchett goodness in a sci-fi setting, tangential asides included.
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Jan 9, 2015 19:08
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Panic! at Nabisco posted:
It's a comic but Rat Queens seems like it would be up your alley.
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Jan 9, 2015 19:53
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Alhazred posted:It's a comic but Rat Queens seems like it would be up your alley. I like Rat Queens a lot and I don't usually like comics at all. I wouldn't say it's like Pratchett except that it has fun with many fantasy cliches.
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Jan 9, 2015 22:00
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AlphaDog posted:I like Rat Queens a lot and I don't usually like comics at all. I wouldn't say it's like Pratchett except that it has fun with many fantasy cliches. Rat Queens is, like, NEXTWAVE for epic fantasy. (I like it, and NEXTWAVE, a lot.)
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Jan 9, 2015 22:58
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