Posts Tagged ‘discworld’

Book twelve in the Discworld series follows the adventures of Magrat Garlick, Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg as the travel to Genua to do some good old fashioned fairy godmothering.

I thought the book took quite a while to get going – I was 15-20% of the way through before they even left for Genua but after that it picked up. Nanny Ogg has firmly cemented herself as one of my favourite characters from the series.

The 11th novel in the Discworld series, Reaper Man tells the story of what happened when Death was retires and goes to work on a farm. This is bad news for senior wizard Windle Poons who finds himself stuck between the world of the living and the dead.

Of course, any novel with Death in is going to be a good one. But I’m not sure how much I enjoyed the other half of the book – the parallel story of Windle Poons. At times it felt like the Fresh Start Club had been invented just to fill a bit of space in the story before getting back to Death.

Ulysses is heavy reading, so in between reading a chapter from it, I’m reading Discworld novels. So far, it’s proved a very successful formula. The most recent having been the ninth in the series, Eric.

It is much shorter than all of the novels so far – about half the length of the most of the others. It is based on Faust, but as I haven’t read that, the references were lost on me.

Never the less, it proved an interesting read. It isn’t my favourite Discworld novel, far from it, but the short length meant that the arguably sparse storyline didn’t get boring because it kept moving in a switch fashion. Plus having Rincewind in a novel is always a good thing.

Not a book for those new to Discworld, but for those who are already fans of the series, it makes for a short and fresh instalment.

The eighth book in the Discworld series, Guards! Guards!, follows the adventures of The Night Watch in the city of Ankh-Morpork. It is almost certainly my favourite novel in the series so far, as I love anything to do with the city, so spending an entire book there was a delight.

The more I read through the books, the more I can see Prachett’s world come together in one cohesive, precisely disordered and very entertaining world. Plus anything that features the head librarian is always going to be awesome.

The seventh book in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series focuses on Djelibeybi, an ancient kingdom not unlike Ancient Egypt.

I hugely enjoyed the start of the novel in which it discusses Teppic at the Assassins Guild in Ankh-Morpork, as well as the description of the kingdom and many interesting rituals and customs presided over by the high preist Dios. My attention trailed a little towards the end, but overall it is one of my favour novels in the series so far.

Wyrd Sisters is the sixth novel in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. For me, it was the first novel where the witches really came into their own – Equal Rites was good, but the development in Wyrd Sisters really brings them along.

As good as Granny Weatherwax is, I have to say that my favourite character is Nanny Ogg. I wasn’t overly in love with the Macbeth theme, but who needs to be when you have such awesome characters.

I was quite excited to get onto Sourcery, the fifth book in the Discworld series, as I’m a big fan of the wizards. Plus, who doesn’t love Rincewind? I’m seriously considering it as a middle name for Chris Junior. While I was an enjoyable read, I didn’t find it quite as good as Equal Rites or Mort – but then anything with that amount of Death in it is always going to be hard to beat.

In the forth book of the Discworld series, a young man named Mort becomes Death’s apprentice. This had a lot of resonance with me as I considered a similar career path back when I was younger, before deciding to go on and become the lion tamer you all now know and love.

I found the book far more witty and engaging than the previous books in the series. Not that I didn’t enjoy them, because I did, but I thought this level was on a level above them – it was simply better. Though of course, it’s easier to write a great novel when you have an inherently funny topic, such as Death.

In the third book of the Discworld series, a dying wizard passes his staff onto a baby without first checking the gender. As it turns out, Eskarina is a girl. But there are no female wizards. What a to do.

I was a little disappointed in the content of the book I think, I was hoping for a in depth examination of gender roles and the struggle of a female wizard in an otherwise all male university. But most of the novel was about the journey to Unseen University rather than what happens when she gets there.

Never the less, it was an enjoyable read and featured plenty of Granny Weatherwax, which is always going to be a good thing.

I’ve just finished reading the second Discworld book, The Light Fantastic. I can’t work out whether I enjoyed it more or less than the first one.

I found it a bit slow to get doing – Rincewind and Twoflower’s adventures weren’t that interesting to me, but as the book went on, I found the tales of the wizards, and particularly the goings on of Ankh-Morpork drew me in to a to an incredibly imaginative world. I’m hoping this bodes well for the third book, which focuses on the wizards and the witches.

I also liked the increasing use of language tricks employed by Pratchett that made it an even cleverer text than the first.