My wife often tells me to slow down and enjoy the books you like, but I seldom listen to her. If I had to make a critique of the books in the series that I have read so far is that I have read them too fast. He takes the reader 90% of the way to the pay-off but allows the slow dawning to set on the reader, so that a bad pun feels like it was done masterfully. There is one very memorable one that he just sort of sneaks in during _Soul Music_. There are puns-galore, if you like that sort of thing. Secondly, he is funny, and he’s not afraid to go for the easy joke. He’s a post-modern Tolkien, but that’s a little off. It is arch and tongue-in-cheek and just fun if you’ve read enough. I’ve been struggling on finding the right word to really describe what I would characterize as Pratchett’s voice. The first is what you try to develop as a writer, a unique voice. There are a couple of things about the series generally that I really enjoyed. There are many familiar elements of the world we inhabit but there is the magic element that rips from genre fiction: what Vonnegut did with science-fiction, Pratchett does with fantasy elements. I don’t usually keep many books in my wish list, but it is now filled up with Discworld books. ![]() I want to learn about all the inhabitants and read all the stories, no matter how tangential. It turns out that I like the world as a whole, and this is a huge strength of Pratchett. Was I just interested in the character of Death, or did I like the world as a whole? I was pleased, since I have to admit that I was a bit worried about the continuity of quality between story-arcs. At this point, I have only read one of those books, the first _Guards, Guards_. I neared the end of one of those books and I bought the first three books from the “Guards” story-arc. A quarter of the way through the second book, I bought the final two books of the arc. I liked it well enough I bought the next two books in the series on the Death story-arc. I bought the first one, _Mort_, just to see if I would like it. I read the entire sequence centered on Death (and his extended family) first, since my introduction to the world of the Disc was the movie version of _Hogfather_. I sought out experts on which order to read the books, since there is no one straight linear way to read the books. I have been sucked into the Discworld, and I am just fine with that. The last few weeks, my reading has been monopolized by the mind of Terry Pratchett. Review #4 Thief of Time audio narrated by Nigel Planer Perhaps that happens even to the best of us as we grow old. In this volume, however, he seemed more preachy than in his previous tales. In this instance, Pratchett broke his own rules.Īs a rule, I have found Pratchett’s observations about politics, religion, society, and people in general to be astute, clever, or amusing. That being said, even fairy stories have to create credible worlds that is, they must follow the rules within the parameters of the universe they create. ![]() Of course, we expect to see the narrative unfold according to the well-established formula–that is part of what we enjoy in the works of our favorite storytellers. Pratchett performs as expected in creating (or carrying forward) his charming characters and visual scene development, but for me the plot was too thin to hold my interest for more than a few pages each time I read in it. Prevail.I am an avid fan of the Discworld series and have read them from the order they were published up to Thief of Time. An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny - Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski.Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape - Jenna Miscavige Hill.Fire Weather: A True Story From A Hotter World - John vaillant. ![]()
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