Is It All Over? A Heart-rending Read

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It's not up to the brilliance of Hogfather or Going Postal, but it is Pratchett and it is Discworld. Pratchett offers us new characters (and creature - you'd think he'd have run out of them by now) and glimpses of old Ankh-Morpork pals - notably Rincewind, which gives one the uneasy feeling of closure.
The main characters are Glenda and Nutt (no plurals, please) as the oddballs, and Trevor and Juliet (and here Pratchett evokes an Ankh-Morpork "Westside Story") as ... well, the pretty ones. Glenda learns what it means to be a crab in a bucket. The rest don't really learn anything of any use to us. Nutt's epiphany as an "ethnic minority" notwithstanding, it's Glenda's story - Glenda who can confront the Tyrant and the Lady and - horrors! - Mrs. Whitlow. It's Glenda who can go from the crab in the bucket to ... a crab out of the bucket.
Pratchett also gives us a pretty well thought out natural history of that endangering species, the football hooligan and what it means to be a part of the many. There is so much that is good in this book, so much that is Pratchett.
It is also heart-rending. Pratchett forgoes his erstwhile chapters and returns to the relentless narrative only to segregate out some false endings. These are concluded with mostly blank pages that blare out "You think it's all over?" To this reader, it is a reminder of the possibility that this is the end of the Discworld, Pratchett's wise and joyous gift to us. Someone else had to type "most of it" for him, as his Alzheimer's robs him of this ability. I have to keep reminding myself that we have already gotten so much from him, how can we ask for more? And I fear someone else trying to take up the baton - something I can only picture as thinning out the material even more.
I hope this isn't Discworld's last gasp, but I am willing to let my favorites retire with grace: Vimes, the witches, and the unsinkable Nobby Nobbs. Tiffany Aching doesn't have to grow up; Carrot and Angua don't have to marry and raise puppies; Moist von Lipwig needn't make paying taxes fun and exciting. I thank Mr. Pratchett for all the joy he has brought through his writing and send him my love.

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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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Newbery Winner

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really like books that don't flash the answers right at you. If I were a kid reading this, some of it wouldn't be quite so obvious (Ms. Lupescu, f'rinstance). And while we didn't get beaten over the head with the answers, the clues were obvious to Ms. Smarty-Pants-Me.
Some unfortunate Harry Potter parallels come up (unfortunate in that some know-it-all like me would say there were Harry Potter parallels: 11 year epiphany meaning it is now time to go to school, family killed, prophecy of a child defeating some evil power, blah-blah, yadda-yaddah). All of this is unfortunate because no one sat around saying dismissively, "Oh that Harry Potter story sounds just like The lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones." Now any story with supernatural elements and a kid in it is going to sound like Harry Potter.

But this book is not like Harry Potter. It's a one-off story that takes Bod from toddler to adulthood. He is raised by kindly folk (for the most part) and we learn it takes a whole graveyard to raise a child - ho ho ho. I love the fiddly details, ghosts that are introduced by the inscriptions on their headstones: "Thomes Pennyworth here he lyes in the certainty of the moft glorious refurrection was already waiting." There is much to like about the book even though this isn't really my type of book. I actually burst into tears when I heard on NPR that Gaiman won the Newbery ... even though I'd already heard about it from the ALA feed into Second Life. In fact, I was pretty much crying over all the awards that day. That the audiobook for Terry Pratchett's Nation had won an award really tore me up.

I came to Neil Gaiman through reading Terry Pratchett. They collaborated on a book and I've slowly worked into some of the Gaiman oeuvre. There is a lot of creative work that I think is brilliant, but I don't have to read/watch again (the original "Alfie" comes to mind) and this book falls into that category. If you know a kid who needs a quality book - especially those hard-to-find-reading-material-for creatures, boys - this would be a prime candidate. (Most of them will appreciate the girl in the book being trundled off and her memory erased.) [Suddenly Marf remembers she has a great-neph who loves Goosebumps and is in need of reading material - heh heh!:]

Our library's copy of this book is in the teen area - which comprises Grade 6 and up. I'm not sure about placement of this book. I suppose because everyone is murdered in the first few pages someone decided this should be a teen book, but it's no worse than the Grimm's folktales of fingers being cut off and people rolled in barrels studded with nails. We're more sensitive these days to exposing kids to violence, even though it's offstage (the murders were done before the book starts although the murderer still has one more to kill). I imagine someone picked this up, read the first two pages and tossed it aside saying "Teen book!" and that was that. Pish and tosh, say I.

Also, let me say that I have nothing against serial books or comics and I think kids should have access to plenty of that but an occasional "meaty" book like this is nice to stretch them. Please, please, though don't denigrate trashy reading and force kids to read hard stuff all the time!


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American Born Chinese

After the Staff Education Day on Young Adult Services Wednesday (I know, I haven't even finished going over the Children's Literature Conference), my thingie - resolve, whatever it was, was to read more YA materials, which I do a bit anyway. Whither my favorite authors go ... I was quite taken with the thought of American Born Chinese by Gene Yang. The other books mentioned sounded too much like the Serious Realistic Fiction That I Go Out of My Way to Avoid in the adult section. "Oh, it's so gooooood!" people tell me about this stuff, but I get enough realism in my own damn life and when I read a book, I want to be taken somewhere else other than, say Vietnam (where I spent my dinner hours growing up) or Nazi Germany (where I had relatives, thankyewverymuch, who may have turned in their Jewish neighbors but certainly suffered more in the war than my stateside family did (we have letters and our family sent clothes, etc. when the war was over). And I have no interest in drugs (okay - not a lot of interest, unless they are tasty frozen concoctions) because I lived through the 60s and 70s - suis allee la, fait cela, obtenu le tattoo.
I have read The Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett (no surprise there - I'm a huge fan) and listened to the audio book read by Stephen Briggs, which is terrific. He reads many of the Pratchett books, adult and YA, and has wonderful characterizations. I even read one of his Johnny Maxwell books (more for boys), which ... was good but not as complex as the Tiffany stories. But then, it is for boys, innit? I love Diana Wynne Jones' children's books and so I have also trod into her YA. Hornbook often has recommendations for YA that pull me away from my usual concentration in Juvenile (and trashy adult mysteries) which led me to The Swan, a graphic novel by Ariyoshi Kyoko. Now, I knew that the Japanese manga were to be read back to front, but for some reason I forgot when I picked up this one, so I was a bit confused for a short while. "This doesn't quite make sense," I thought, "but I can see where it might if I ... Awwww, shhhhhugar!" And I had to start over ... from the back. I can see where teens might enjoy that book, but it wasn't my cup o' cha. It's disconcerting to see Japanese characters (the people kind) all wrapped up in something so european as ballet (but our teens could relate) and I'm not keen on romantic longing and angst (ew! ew! - but teens could relate). Probably won't read more of that, which I think is a series. I also read The Life of Pi by Yann Martel as a YA recommendation (very funny article in Hornbook where Martel is at a book-signing and a young teen comes up and gushes about how much he really liked the tiger in the boat. I don't wanna spoil anyone's read of this, [Stop reading here] but Pi made Mr. Parker up. [Safe to read again.]).

But I came here to bury Caesar, not to praise him, so on to American Born Chinese. Which I read yesterday.

This graphic novel weaves a story on several levels: Chinese folkloric background story, an only slightly exaggerated (loved the lips on the test animals!) realistic story of the titular American born Chinese kid, and the sit-com over-the-top (complete with laugh-track along the bottom of the frames) version with the character that looks like he stepped right out of Claire Bishop's "Five Chinese Brothers": Chin-kee. The story is touching, milk-out-the-nose-snortingly funny, and enlightening - I cannot say enough good things about it. I had only one teensy problem with one itsy-bitsy frame, but I won't go into it here or I can see a bit of trouble with my co-workers on this. Oh well, just call me "Mr. Partypooper." Other than that, this story is PERFECT as well as perfectly beautifully drawn.