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The only thing I thought was weird about Thud! was how Nobby gets into a perfectly happy relationship and everybody takes it for granted that they have to split him up because she's too good for him.
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Apr 26, 2014 17:47
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I think they get off on a technicality. (The risk of sourcery as the reason for the celibacy rule is probably old enough now that it could be tactily ignored if Pratchett wanted to write about a wizard father.)
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Jun 5, 2014 22:09
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I'm just glad that Briggs doesn't narrate all the footnotes from the bottom of a well. Although, yeah, it did take some time before I got used to it, but I eventually decided that Briggs is better.
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Jun 6, 2014 23:44
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I was a bit less surprised since I'd already read The Man Who Was Thursday and knew Pratchett was a big Chesterton fan.
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Jul 8, 2014 18:13
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Reading again through Witches Abroad, the characters are in the right place and the humor is there but the plot is really disappointing compared to Lords and Ladies or even Wyrd Sisters. Lily is kind of creepy but she's just not effective as a villain because her ideology is basically "make people follow stories, which makes me the good one because." Still, Nanny got farmhouse'd, which was worth the price of admission right there, as is the joke about gumbo.
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Aug 22, 2014 23:18
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rejutka posted:That I recall, Vimes marries Lady Sybil and then has it landed in his lap that he is now in charge of seven million dollars. SEVEN. MILLION. DOLLARS. Vimesy is someone who gives no fucks about money except its utility - cf Boots theory of reflected sound of underground spirits - and would just treat it as some useful thing if he got any. He's also not the kind of person who thinks of giving someone money as a "boring" or less than thoughtful gift. That is the kind of thinking you do when you're used to having plenty of money.
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Aug 31, 2014 02:04
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Ultimately the Man Who Was Thursday ending was basically inevitable, given Pratchett's love of Chesterton.
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Sep 2, 2014 21:01
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Have they nailed anyone down for the Watch series yet?
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Oct 18, 2014 02:02
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Iacen posted:Whoever told Jeremy Irons to use that voice really should be hanged up by the Bura'zak-ka. Iacen, we don't practice that punishment at Something Awful.
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Oct 30, 2014 02:42
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Makes me wonder where the second Dirk Gently book came from, then, because the resolution to that one made less sense than the time travel plot.
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Jan 15, 2015 23:50
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Okay, new topic: It really annoys me that Stephen Briggs reads all the characters from the monastery in Thief of Time with the standard Atlocious Oliental-Sounding Accent. I had a lot of problems with the large-cast recording* but that wasn't one of them. *although it did get Death's voice just right. People always try to give him A VERY DEEP BASS VOICE and it just doesn't work for many people if they don't actually already have deep bass voices.
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Jan 26, 2015 01:15
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Someday I'd like to hear Witches Abroad read by a woman, given that pretty much every character worth mentioning in it is female.
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Feb 1, 2015 06:23
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I didn't really see anything wrong with Unseen Academicals except that it relied much more heavily on references to football and British culture that won't be familiar to people who don't live in the UK, and also that it wasn't Going Postal and therefore not the best.
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Feb 4, 2015 01:49
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(I was going to say Thud! was the best once, but on rereading it it's astonishing how much less topical it seems today than it did at the time.)
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Feb 4, 2015 01:51
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The best hidden reference in Soul Music is still that Death arrives for the finale "in a coat he borrowed from [the] Dean."
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Feb 4, 2015 19:34
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You can argue that Nanny is the more powerful witch because she can utilize Granny and Granny is not as good at doing the reverse as she thinks she is. You shouldn't argue that where Granny can hear you, though.
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Feb 11, 2015 16:14
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Fried Chicken posted:Though speaking of styles, I'll never get tired of the fact that despite being described as meek and soppy, Magrat's style is overwhelming brute force against the target, whether it is blowing up a door and dungeon wall because she didn't want to wait for the keys, or beating seven shades of hell out of the elf queen. Not really surprising when you consider that her top character trait is basically "thinking that things are Really Important."
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Feb 13, 2015 01:58
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Granny is totally bitter and spiteful; see The Sea and Little FIshes for an example. Not even just the bit about the Witch Trials! The story starts with Nanny deliberately baiting Granny with a token of esteem someone gave Nanny, so that Granny will take out a bit of her ongoing grudge on Nanny and not on the rest of the world.
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Feb 13, 2015 15:38
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Guess it's time to start reading again from the beginning. Are the British versions of his ebooks notably higher quality than the American ones? A lot of HarperCollins stuff seems to be a bit iffy, especially ebooks that were made at the beginning of the ebook era.
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Mar 12, 2015 18:57
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Professor Bengo Macarona is a gay wizard on loan to UU from Quirm in Unseen Academicals.
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Mar 29, 2015 17:05
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thespaceinvader posted:How the hell do they manage those ridiculous page-long 4-or-5-deep footnote nests in the early books? Sequentially. (The Planer audiobooks also apply a deep reverb to footnote text so that it sounds like it's being read to you from the bottom of a hole.)
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Apr 13, 2015 21:59
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Honestly, the witches, like the Watch, don't lose steam so much as build up too much steam to the point of becoming more or less unstoppable within their areas of expertise and then having trouble staying inside the lines of a story.
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Apr 23, 2015 04:05
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Listening the the A Blink of the Screen on audiobook, I finally got to hear Stephen Briggs do the witches, and he's almost as bad at it as he is good at doing the Ankh-Morpork cast. I would really like to hear those books re-recorded with a female narrator. (Actually, I'd like to hear multiple narrators for lots of books, but I guess the market just isn't there.)
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May 28, 2015 03:40
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Pidmon posted:Theif of Time had multiple narrators including Harlon Ellison. It owned bones. I really like that version's Death, as I think I've mentioned before (he did Death as deep and flatly calm instead of overdoing the bass), and a lot of the actors weren't very good at a variety of voices, either. Lobsang as read by the narrator from the Oi Dong scenes felt like a completely different character from the Lobsang voiced by Susan's narrator. Still, it was way above Briggs giving everybody from the monastery a generic bad Asian accent.
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May 29, 2015 04:08
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I started Raising Steam in the hope that people were exaggerating the problems with it. ...they weren't. That makes me sad.
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Aug 15, 2015 19:57
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(Although, I think some of it isn't Alzheimer's so much as an increasingly-large web of relationships and established characters who all have to be reintroduced for new readers each time, frequently requiring a new joke about an old thing.)
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Aug 23, 2015 02:12
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Konstantin posted:why a character who was written as a pacifist is killing a bunch of bandits. I wouldn't call him a pacifist, but yeah, wandering out to be the badass who kills a bunch of criminals and makes a joke about it seemed out of character to me. I also thought Lord Vetinari's relationship with Moist suffered in later books, as well. After Going Postal there's really no reason why Vetinari should be a jerk to Moist; he's got him right where he wants him. It seems almost as though he's maintaining a hostile tone purely in order to give the author a chance to exposit about exactly how their working relationship got formed.
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Aug 23, 2015 18:53
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Stroth posted:Remember the bit in Making Money when Vetinari points out that he's actually more frightened when he's holding a sword than when someone is holding a sword on him? Even in Going Postal it was a point of pride to Moist that while he'd scammed people terribly, he'd never in his life physically harmed anyone. The man's a pretty hardcore pacifist. Moist wasn't the character I was thinking of. It was Vetinari who kills the bandits. And yeah, he's a killer, but slaughtering bandits and making a joke about it doesn't seem like something that was in modern Vetinari's wheelhouse.
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Aug 24, 2015 13:18
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Having deeply unimpressive villains is the major flaw in Making Money, yeah—especially after Going Postal had a top-tier Pratchett villain in Gilt. Well, okay, I guess it's also flawed in that it's basically an argument in favor of fiat currency and nobody is really arguing against that except Ron Paul.
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Aug 26, 2015 21:42
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ZeusJupitar posted:Has there ever been any explanation as to why the other witches give Mrs Earwig the time of day, given that she doesn't seem to be a witch in any meaningful sense? I presume they're just afraid of her, which is sufficient qualification even if you aren't actually doing any work.
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Aug 30, 2015 15:46
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Tehan posted:Witches Abroad can be interpreted as Granny throwing down against utilitarianism. Possibly, although I have a hard time interpreting Witches Abroad as being about anything but firming up Granny's character, because Lilith's ethos is so inchoate it's almost not there. "I'll force people's lives to match stories (or if that's too hard I'll just punish them for not matching stories), and this makes me good because ???????."
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Sep 27, 2015 02:18
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The book isn't actually about football, though?
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Oct 18, 2015 20:40
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Okay, your long post deserves a bit more effort on my part, so: Ultimately, Unseen Academicals is about crowd psychology, not about football. The football references are a device that lets Pratchett talk about different facets of crowd psychology; satirizing football isn't the top priority. Therefore, I don't think there's any particular reason why Pratchett should restrict himself to modern football culture since what he's ultimately doing is mining for cultural touchstones that lots of people will find resonant. (This still frequently falls flat, of course, since there are some pretty major beats, like "You think it's all over?", that make absolutely no sense to soccer-playing Americans like myself.)
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Oct 18, 2015 23:08
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A comprehensive fancy hardcover reprint?
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Jan 16, 2016 15:53
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The weird part of Thud! for me is always everybody's determination to break up Nobby's happy relationship as though this was the obvious right thing to do.
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Jan 17, 2016 15:37
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I remember the Discworld RPG mentioned that Death is incredibly bad at all games but will always win anyway unless he decides he ought to lose, which sounds about right.
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Apr 26, 2016 21:43
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Okay, it's been long enough that I feel like I can say this without disrespecting a great man who just died—I feel like the sequence at the beginning of The Shepherd's Crown was totally wrong. It feels to me like Granny was getting her send-off as an audience favorite rather than a realistic one, and it felt off to have every important character ever, more or less, drop in to talk about how great she was. (Nice though it was to see Agnes Nitt again.) Granny was a good person in a lot of ways, but she was also a giant rear end in a top hat in a lot of ways, and one of those ways was that she deliberately didn't let people get close or see that she was being nice to them. I feel like it would have been a lot truer to her as a character to die unmourned except by maybe the ten people who knew her best. And the audience, obviously.
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Apr 29, 2016 00:02
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I don't actually think anything was wrong with Unseen Academicals except that it was chock-full of references that only make sense to British people, more than any other Discworld book I could name.
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Jul 19, 2016 22:13
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Kajeesus posted:It had that weird orc plot that kind of came out of nowhere and didn't go anywhere. And the Patrician being weirdly obsessed with a random baker, to the point where he puzzles out her secret cheese and onion pie recipe. Other than that, its only crime was being British as git. The orc plot feels like it fits into the theme of "you can't just be nice and hope people will like you, you have to demand that they do." Also I'm obsessed with good pies, so the Patrician should be, too. Meanwhile, I'm rather irritated that the quality of Pratchett's books on audible.com is much lower than the quality of the same books from the same publisher on audible.co.uk.
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Jul 20, 2016 03:04
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What's at stake in Unseen Academicals is the success of Vetinari's attempt to shift Ankh-Morpork's crowd psychology into something a little less unhealthy.
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Jul 22, 2016 22:07
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