Id On Legs

Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I may have liked this book better the second time. It has some wonderful moments, mostly involving Esme cleaning her ear. There's one brilliant quote from Magrat about good people creating justice and the bad inventing mercy.

Reading other people's reviews is interesting. Loved the French translation names for Esme, Nanny, and Magrat. Sometimes I think the most profound reviews are the ones that hit farthest from the mark. One person below couldn't get into the story at all - was unable to finish even the first chapter. Heh! At that time, Pratchett didn't use chapter divisions. But the beginning of this book has foreshadowing elements that don't make sense until you get over halfway through the story. This is probably what made it more enjoyable to me on the second read. Ah, that's Mrs. Gogol and Baron Samedi - excuse me - Saturday!

I learned an interesting fact, that Pratchett based this on the contrast between a Disney theme park and the real thing - as in New Orleans. Unfortunately, the reviewer seemed to think it sad that Pratchett thought life looked better through the bottom of a beer glass. I think the reviewer should get over this obsession with alcohol. Some people have a wonderful time at theme parks and when I was a kid, that could be fun. But then you grow up and want to appreciate the grittier things in life. With or without a bananananana dakyri. [Please note that only Nanny is a drinker. She's an Id on legs: food, drink, sex.]

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Bittersweet

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Read the Kindle edition this time, while I was away. The footnotes, while fiddly, are handled well. You click on the link and it sends you to the end of the book for the footnote, then press "back" to return to reading. Also have the condensed audiobook read by Tony Robinson. It's a shame his readings of Pratchett's works are condensed because I love his characterizations. There is a problem with some of the lines being too soft to hear if you're listening while driving on the highway in a cheap car and, well, you just miss so much in an abridged story. Someday I hope to acquire the unabridged Nigel Planer version. Planer also does a first-rate job, but the cost of the audiobooks he reads are prohibitive unless you subscribe to audible.com .

This, the first in the Watch series, is a story about bitterness and how we handle it. Captain Vimes funnels his into (or out of) a bottle (or more than just "a" bottle), the spinster Lady Ramkin devotes her life to the care and welfare of pets (of a sort), and the bitterness of the Elucidated Brethren becomes incarnate. Along with Captain Vimes, we meet Carrot Ironfoundersson, the Disc's tallest dwarf, who wouldn't know bitterness (or a metaphor) if it dared to slap him upside his head; Cheeky Nobby Nobbs (the Disc's shortest non-dwarf); and the man with the lucky arrow, Sergeant Colon. We observe the Patrician's peculiar methods of employee motivation and pest control. As usual, Pratchett turns a fairytale inside out. A king is found to save the land from the predations of a dragon, but although the core story doesn't work out the way expected, it does work out to the satisfaction of the reader.

Highly recommended. In fact, it's a million-to-one chance you'll love it. Stands to reason.

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Polly Wanna Wossname

Eric by Terry Pratchett


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I'm not the Rincewind fan some might be. Even less if David Jason is playing him. I don't understand that at all (of course, I looked up the dvd on Amazon to check the name of the actor and discovered that "The Color of Magic" was finally on sale in a format I can use ... and bought it immediately. Soooo, so much for that opinion!) and think Nigel Planer would have been a more likely Rincewind. Anyway, I needed something light and refreshing after that Anthony Trollope oeuvre, and ordered this for the Kindle. It was about 1/10 the size and just what the "Wizzard" ordered.
Rincewind stories fall into the "It's just one thing after another" category that my friend's mother complains about. Of course, she applied it to Pixar's "Finding Nemo" but it does describe the Rincewind stories in general and this one in particular [Interesting Times is an exception:]. That doesn't mean it isn't pure delight. The Kindle version did not have the illustrations the original did, so I can't comment on that. Rincewind would lend himself to a comic book or graphic novel format, considering the episodic nature of his adventures.
In this story, Rincewind is accidentally conjured up by a teenage boy Faust wannabe. It's all an excuse to send up the Faust legend, pre-Colombian civilization, Trojan War mythos, physics (one of Pratchett's favorite targets), and the infernal office politics engine (which justly deserves anything thrown at it). They are all nicely skewered but I think the last two parts suffer from inadequate development.

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Plus ça change, plus c'est la même debâcle economique

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This long, shambling story is not without interest. There is romance, intrigue, politics, Ponzi schemes, American character assassination (oh, I love it when the Brits do that - it's so much fun to see ourselves as others see us), a social structure in upheaval, and a critique of literary criticism. But it is pretty darn long. I read the Kindle edition and didn't pay attention to how long it was or I might have been daunted. Still, I had a short vacation coming up, spending a few days in a hotel in the middle of nowhere without a car, and figured if anything would drive me to read this, that would do it.
After that Hardy hodgepodge (Desperate Remedies, see my so-called review of that at http://staff-developomendo.blogspot.com/... ), I was leery of Trollope, but actually found myself enjoying this book. The characters and situations were not as over-the-top as in the Hardy story. Heroines who want answers about their fiancés will openly defy their mothers and take a train alone for the first time to track down answers, and good on 'em, I say!
Overly honorable men actually wrestle with their lesser, uglier feelings for quite a while before conquering them.
Chinless things in clubs have varying degrees of degradation if not actual separate and believable personalities.
And small, furry creatures from Alpha-Centauri would be, if they appeared in this book, separate and believable small, furry creatures from Alpha-Centauri.
Whatever you do, don't read the Wikipedia plot summary of this, which seems to be from a different version of the novel than I read. Paul went to Mexico to check on the progress of the railroad? Not in my book. That was just an offer to get him out of the boardroom and in the end he didn't fall for it. Also, an "editor" of that article complained that too much of the plot summary was given over to details of the plot. Excuse me? It's a frickin' plot summary! The complaint should be, the details of the plot are, at times, inaccurate. And how do you condense 100 chapters to a few paragraphs?
Anyway, whether it's a spoiler or not, all works out for The Best and the Truly Noble, or at least, Likable characters get the happy ending they so richly deserve. If you're touchy about anti-Semitism, you might want to take a chill pill before reading, or at least hold out for "fat, old Jew" who shows the backward Christians what Dignity is.

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