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Arist posted:The zombie plot in Reaper Man is honestly kind of weak but the Death half of that book is enough to elevate the entire thing to some of the strongest material in the entire series. I've come around on the zombie plot. I enjoy the end of it enough to think it is worth it. "I don't know. How should I know? Because we're all in this together, I suppose. Because we don't leave our people in there. Because you're a long time dead. Because anything is better than being alone. Because Humans are human."
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Mar 15, 2019 03:22
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The DPRK posted:If I wanted to give Pratchett an honest go, where should I start do you think? It's not unusual for me to duck out of a series everyone thinks is amazing because I can't get through the set up. I'd suggest Nation for this particular scenario; it's from his peak as a writer, it covers some good weighty stuff, and you don't have to worry about jumping into a long series two-thirds of the way through.
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Mar 15, 2019 04:11
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SirSamVimes posted:If you want to read Night Watch (and you should, it's my favourite Discworld book), here's the sequence I'd go through: I thought Jingo owned myself.
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Mar 15, 2019 05:40
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It is worth noting that you don't need to read anything else to enjoy Night Watch, though the context is still nice. I literally threw a bunch of Discworld books at one of my friends a few years back to get him into them, and despite my warnings he started with Night Watch, but he still absolutely loved it because regardless of anything else it's a really fuckin' solid book.
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Mar 15, 2019 06:00
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Tree Bucket posted:Not being British, I always wondered about that quote- is it from an influential reviewer, or just some random in a provincial paper?
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Mar 15, 2019 08:25
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https://www.tor.com/2019/03/15/the-...9aCqqN7Gd2-nZ2M
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Mar 15, 2019 14:53
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The_White_Crane posted:Regardless of the accuracy of your evaluation of Pratchett's insight (or lack thereof) into the religious mind, one doesn't have to "equate one's personal identity with the media one consumes" to find it vaguely insulting to have an author whose work speaks to one on an emotional or intellectual level labelled as "emotionally and intellectually stunted". yeah your problem is that you're still equating yourself with terry pratchett; or, more simply, that you don't like when you things you like are criticized. worse, your model of personal identification leaves no room for real criticism of anything ever. let's pretend you loving love the wife of bath's prologue, you see yourself as an ardent feminist, and you identify deeply with the wife of bath herself. i then argue that she actually lacks agency completely and is instead wholly circumscribed by classical antifieminist tropes and (the occasional vividness of her language aside) is still as misogynist a character as her literary precursors or peers. this, by your metric, would deeply offend you, since i've now called you a misogynist! after all, you like the wife of bath, and i've said the wife of bath is misogynist, and therefore by an extremely stupid transitive property that makes you misogynist! this would, obviously, foreclose any discussion of any work of art that anyone felt strongly about. i don't doubt that you really love pratchett, but that doesn't make "inquisition bad" or "religion make people do bad things" into deep, nuanced, or interesting observations. if pointing out that those observations are emotionally and intellectually shallow upsets you then, well, sorry?
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Mar 16, 2019 05:47
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i dont want to talk about the religion thing anymore. it's not what i dislike about terry pratchett. the thing i dislike about terry pratchett is that half of his books have exactly the same plots with only the proper nouns changed and no one acknowledges or talks about this and that legitimately gives me a kind of dissociative anxiety like, carpe jugulum and lords and ladies are the same book! reaper man and hogfather are the same book! i've read a dozen discworld books and four of those have been the same book! do you people not see or is this some kind of artistically horrifying conspiracy of silence where everyone knows this but no one says anything? chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 05:55
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i dont want to talk about the religion thing anymore. it's not what i dislike about terry pratchett. the thing i dislike about terry pratchett is that half of his books have exactly the same plots with only the proper nouns changed and no one acknowledges or talks about this and that legitimately gives me a kind of dissociative anxiety Reaper Man and Hogfather are the same book... No, you're an idiot,. Shut the gently caress up. They have similar themes is all, but they're not at all the same novel. They're structurally entirely different, the characters have different arcs, the themes aren't the same. What the gently caress kind of mix of bath salts and exotic animal jenkem are you on anyway ? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 16, 2019 06:06
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i dont want to talk about the religion thing anymore. it's not what i dislike about terry pratchett. the thing i dislike about terry pratchett is that half of his books have exactly the same plots with only the proper nouns changed and no one acknowledges or talks about this and that legitimately gives me a kind of dissociative anxiety In what way are any of those the same plot?
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Mar 16, 2019 06:07
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mllaneza posted:Reaper Man and Hogfather are the same book... here is something i have posted on the subject before: chernobyl kinsman posted:No but like Hogfather and Reaper Man are identical down to specific incidents
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Mar 16, 2019 06:08
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Yeah you can't just drop that poo poo in our laps with no reasoning my dude e: Okay, you provided reasoning. It's bad.
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Mar 16, 2019 06:08
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i'll get to lords and ladies/carpe jugulum later but no dude it's the same exact plot. a mythical figure goes missing, which leads to a backup of the specific energy that said mythical figure is responsible for dispersing, which leads to said energy manifesting chaotically in a number of new entities, and which is ultimately resolved when the mythical figure returns and dissipates the backlog of energy it's the same plot
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Mar 16, 2019 06:12
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chernobyl kinsman posted:that legitimately gives me a kind of dissociative anxiety If people disagreeing you when discussing books triggers your anxiety disorder I would suggest that you avoid doing so; it doesn't sound particularly good for your mental health.
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Mar 16, 2019 06:16
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The actual manifestations of those superficially similar phenomena are wholly different but to my recollection (and to be fair, I haven't read it in years) the part of Hogfather concerning folklore coming to life is not really a major part of that book anyway.
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Mar 16, 2019 06:16
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Arist posted:The actual manifestations of those superficially similar phenomena are wholly different but to my recollection the part of Hogfather concerning folklore coming to life is not really a major part of that book anyway. no, you've got it backwards. they're structurally identical. "Pile of Garbage coming to life and attacking the wizards because of an excess in Life Energy due to lack of Death to channel away that energy, disappearing when Death returns" and "Pixie coming to life and attacks the wizards because of an excess in Belief Energy due to lack of Hogfather to channel away that energy, disappearing when Hogfather returns" are only superficially different. if you change the proper nouns you have the same structure. Tunicate posted:If people disagreeing you when discussing books triggers your anxiety disorder I would suggest that you avoid doing so; it doesn't sound particularly good for your mental health. mods please permaban this poster for making fun of my minor psychological problems chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 06:17
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one of the downsides of discworld being split up into a number of discrete mini-series is that later works in each sequence tend to iterate on ideas in previous ones it's especially clear in lords and ladies because most of that is pratchett still getting a handle on the witches and their parodically pastoral setting, and then carpe jugulum takes that formula with the characterization detailed in the intervening works and uses it to portray basically the same conflict but with larger stakes and more investment in the protagonists' own safety (until the vampires enter the scene, weatherwax has been comically invincible while wagging her finger at immortal and unchanging beings, and jugulum is the first novel where she has to confront her own mortality, which probably gives her the impetus to hand the storyline over to tiffany aching whose books i have never read) it's sort of the same thing with the rincewind books, where the first two stories starring him were attempts at a lighthearted but more generic fantasy series and then pratchett just decided to make his globetrotting (disctrotting?) into an excuse to use him as the point-of-view character in a series of novel-sized international pastiche shitposts Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 06:33
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also it's probably necessary to approach these books as more than just their overarching themes, because they're also vehicles for comedy and much of what distinguishes one story from another is the gags they trot out not all of them are successful (i dislike virtually everything involving angua), but reaper man's undead-rights brigade and american gothic pastiche is still distinctly separate from hogfather's holiday jokes
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Mar 16, 2019 06:37
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Oxxidation posted:one of the downsides of discworld being split up into a number of discrete mini-series is that later works in each sequence tend to iterate on ideas in previous ones thank you, this is a very fair reading, and i no longer feel like im going insane
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Mar 16, 2019 06:37
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Night Watch is my favourite Discworld book but the depth/backstory it gives to a bunch of characters is really neat and is something that a first-time reader wouldn't really care about. Reading it first would dull the experience.
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Mar 16, 2019 07:18
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Lords and Ladies and Carpe Jugulum are somewhat similar in theme and structure, I agree, but there are still lots of pretty major differences (Lords and Ladies is in my opinion one of the most forgettable Discworld books, so that doesn't help). Reaper Man and Hogfather have basically no similarity to each other besides both using the idea of anthropomorphic-personification-energy that you mentioned. The plots go completely different from there: Reaper Man follows Death as he tries to live a different life, and the side effects of it are felt by a group of wizards/undead; Hogfather focuses on Death's and Susan's attempts to put right the attempted murder of the Hogfather and the Hogfather himself isn't even a character. Sure, the stuff with Bilious in Hogfather is initially similar to the wizards bit in Reaper Man, but everything else in the books is different. You've taken only one superficial aspect of the first half of each book and drawn a wild-rear end conclusion. And it particularly annoys me that you focus on these superficial details while simultaneously criticizing Pratchett for being too superficial. If you can't get past the surface, that ain't Pratchett's fault.
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Mar 16, 2019 09:10
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chernobyl kinsman posted:yeah your problem is that you're still equating yourself with terry pratchett; or, more simply, that you don't like when you things you like are criticized. worse, your model of personal identification leaves no room for real criticism of anything ever. You can criticise something perfectly well without calling the author "intellectually and emotionally stunted", and I've clearly explained that one doesn't have to "equate oneself" with the media (or for that matter the author) to percieve "hey this thing you think is meaningful is written by and for stupid babies" as implying that people who like the thing are therefore stupid babies. chernobyl kinsman posted:let's pretend you loving love the wife of bath's prologue, you see yourself as an ardent feminist, and you identify deeply with the wife of bath herself. i then argue that she actually lacks agency completely and is instead wholly circumscribed by classical antifieminist tropes and (the occasional vividness of her language aside) is still as misogynist a character as her literary precursors or peers. this, by your metric, would deeply offend you, since i've now called you a misogynist! after all, you like the wife of bath, and i've said the wife of bath is misogynist, and therefore by an extremely stupid transitive property that makes you misogynist! This isn't at all analogous to your first dunk on Pratchett though. If you'd stuck with "pratchett's lack of personal experience of religion affects his writing of it and makes his take on it superficial", that would be one thing. But you didn't do that. chernobyl kinsman posted:the bulk of atheists - and all of the evangelical type - can only engage with the external trappings of religion, as they lack both the personal experience of mature faith and any interest in understanding what that experience is like. this makes their writing and their thoughts on the matter shallow and silly. they are emotionally and intellectually stunted, locked in a permanent stage of angry reaction against their parents for dragging them to sunday school when they were twelve. this is the sort that terry pratchett is There's a plain difference between "this aspect of the work is poorly handled and not as good as you think it is" and "the author is a childish idiot as are all the people who think like him". A better analogy would be if I was highly invested in the Wife of Bath as a character and a feminist icon, and you said "Chaucer was a rapist and his portrayal of the Wife of Bath reflects how rapists see women". (I mean, that take's much more reasonable since there's some evidence to suggest that Chaucer was in fact a rapist and it's not a wholly subjective thing like your opinion of Pratchett's emotional maturity, but w/e.) The_White_Crane fucked around with this message at 10:06 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 10:03
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chernobyl kinsman posted:the bulk of atheists - and all of the evangelical type - can only engage with the external trappings of religion, as they lack both the personal experience of mature faith and any interest in understanding what that experience is like. this makes their writing and their thoughts on the matter shallow and silly. they are emotionally and intellectually stunted, locked in a permanent stage of angry reaction against their parents for dragging them to sunday school when they were twelve. this is the sort that terry pratchett is
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Mar 16, 2019 11:28
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DontMockMySmock posted:Lords and Ladies and Carpe Jugulum are somewhat similar in theme and structure, I agree, but there are still lots of pretty major differences (Lords and Ladies is in my opinion one of the most forgettable Discworld books, so that doesn't help). It's more that he's taking the Campbell attitude that there are only six plots in fiction and - perhaps wilfully - misinterpreting that to say that all books using a given plot are the same. This is like saying it doesn't matter what clothes you wear, you always have the same body. The reality is that you can dress well, you can dress poorly, you can dress in colours that clash or contrast, and your look will change accordingly. Let's compare L&L with CJ, since they're indeed quite similar on the surface: a supernatural enemy is invited to Lancre by someone who doesn't understand the consequences and tries to take over before being defeated by its own rival. Both books also have a theme of how young people think they know better but don't. But if you examine them more closely, the underlying themes are polar opposites. L&L is about the power of self-belief and doubting others; CJ is about external faith and self-doubt. L&L examines why we tell ourselves stories because they are more palatable than the reality; CJ examines a conscious attempt to abandon stories and tradition for realism and modernism.
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Mar 16, 2019 11:41
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chernobyl kinsman posted:no, you've got it backwards. they're structurally identical. "Pile of Garbage coming to life and attacking the wizards because of an excess in Life Energy due to lack of Death to channel away that energy, disappearing when Death returns" and "Pixie coming to life and attacks the wizards because of an excess in Belief Energy due to lack of Hogfather to channel away that energy, disappearing when Hogfather returns" are only superficially different. if you change the proper nouns you have the same structure. Well, it'll be a while before you can respond to this, but that's an argument on the order of criticizing Shakespeare because he copied his plots from other sources. The plot is just the skeleton.
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Mar 16, 2019 12:37
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Lords and Ladies is the 2nd most forgettable Discworld IMO, only Moving Pictures tops itchernobyl kinsman posted:mods please permaban this poster for making fun of my minor psychological problems It would really help people accept and engage with your arguments if you didn't end half your posts with snarky comebacks like this.
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Mar 16, 2019 13:14
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Lord and Ladies was probably the only Discworld novel I didn't really like re-reading but I didn't dislike it either. I'm sure everyone who's reading this post was just dying to know that. Are there any Pratchett copy-cats that are worth even looking into? I wouldn't mind a humorous fairy tale type of book every now and then and since Disney hasn't yet bought the rights to Discworld I guess there's no more of that coming.
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Mar 16, 2019 13:20
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For a long time Lords and Ladies was my favorite Discworld novel and I'm kind of marveling over the fact that so many find it forgettable. Just kind of interesting that we can love the series as a whole so much and still have such different takes.
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Mar 16, 2019 14:45
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Snow Cone Capone posted:Lords and Ladies is the 2nd most forgettable Discworld IMO, only Moving Pictures tops it I don't know many people who rate either of those below Sourcery.
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Mar 16, 2019 15:04
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E: cant read
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Mar 16, 2019 15:18
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The only Discworld books I genuinely don't like are Monstrous Regiment and Unseen Academicals. It's not so much that the writing in them is particularly worse or better than the others, it that both those books are extremely predictable and the gags quickly become boring and repetitive. Moving Pictures, like several other books, is saved by Gaspode. It's always been interesting to me how much disagreement there is over the worst Discworld book. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 15:21
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Moving Pictures can't be the worst because it introduced Ridcully.
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Mar 16, 2019 15:37
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Jerry Cotton posted:Are there any Pratchett copy-cats that are worth even looking into? I wouldn't mind a humorous fairy tale type of book every now and then and since Disney hasn't yet bought the rights to Discworld I guess there's no more of that coming. You would probably enjoy Tom Holt's earlier works (I say this because I haven't read his stuff that's come out in the last 12 years so I can't say if he's still doing good work). His books up through Nothing But Blue Skies (2001) deal with retelling, reimagining or extending classic fables including the Flying Dutchman, wish-granting lakes, and Faust. I read them when I was in high school, so huge grain of salt, they might be poo poo because the taste centers of teens are still developing, but I remember them being a cut above most other fantasy humorists (who, with very few exceptions, tend to be lovely WHAT IF LORD OF THE RINGS BUT PUNS). Everything since then I think has been in one of two series based around either office workers in a sorcery office or magic donuts (really). I tried to crack one of them open a while ago but they were interminable.
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Mar 16, 2019 15:58
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Strange Cares posted:You would probably enjoy Tom Holt's earlier works (I say this because I haven't read his stuff that's come out in the last 12 years so I can't say if he's still doing good work). His books up through Nothing But Blue Skies (2001) deal with retelling, reimagining or extending classic fables including the Flying Dutchman, wish-granting lakes, and Faust. I read them when I was in high school, so huge grain of salt, they might be poo poo because the taste centers of teens are still developing, but I remember them being a cut above most other fantasy humorists (who, with very few exceptions, tend to be lovely WHAT IF LORD OF THE RINGS BUT PUNS). Hmm well looks like a library has the Faust one so maybe I'll check it out 
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Mar 16, 2019 16:04
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Everyone should read one Tom Holt book, and exactly one Tom Holt book because they're all exactly the same. I was shocked when it turned out he was K.J. Parker. Who's Afraid of Beowulf? would be my recommendation.
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Mar 16, 2019 16:14
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Jedit posted:Everyone should read one Tom Holt book, and exactly one Tom Holt book because they're all exactly the same. I was shocked when it turned out he was K.J. Parker. I was shocked as I read this and then I thought about it. Under both names he is weirdly focused on bureaucracies. But drat, Sharps is so much better than Expecting Someone Taller.
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Mar 16, 2019 16:49
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Honestly the biggest problem is that few fantasy authors share Pratchett‘s humanism, which is the major factor that prevents his (later) work from coming across as deeply cynical or aloof as even a lot of non-comical fantasy does.
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Mar 16, 2019 16:52
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Jedit posted:I don't know many people who rate either of those below Sourcery. Oh yeah lol Sourcery was incredibly forgettable
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Mar 16, 2019 17:27
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Snow Cone Capone posted:Oh yeah lol Sourcery was incredibly forgettable I literally forgot it  Yeah didn't enjoy re-reading that one either.
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Mar 16, 2019 17:30
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Also I've only ever read Eric in standard novel form and that was kind a chore despite how short it is. I'm going to make a hot take, though, and say that Discworld was winding down anyway by the time Terry passed. I haven't re-read them yet but I recall Snuff, Unseen Academicals and Raising Steam as being just OK, and I don't think it was the brain disease as much as it was just running out of material... OTOH I haven't had time to get through the Tiffany Aching books and I've heard that the last one was really stellar, so who knows.
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Mar 16, 2019 17:48
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