chuckle Never even heard of it, my friend. As for Malory Towers, I caught up with them last year. It helps if you know that I will read sauce-bottle labels if there’s nothing else to read, although I draw the line at the barrow-loads of supermarket romance that Mrs M ploughs through.
Teppic: “How do you make them {camels} kneel, did you say? I’ve got any amount of sharp things.”
I like this line, paraphrased:
Guard: “Drop all of your weapons.”
Teppic: “All of them? This could take a while.”
And also, “…looked at himself in the mirror, and very very slowly, fell over.”
I quite liked, “I got 93% in knife throwing. Which eyeball don’t you need?”
I’m glad you have such standards!
Trebizon is a semi-modern version of Malory Towers, with more teen angst and fewer midnight feasts. My sister and I used to routinely disparage each other’s choice of literature, whilst I sneakily read her Trebizon books and she worked her way through my Stainless Steel Rat collection. (Which she is now re-reading, hurray!)
Oh, how could we forget this one?
Teppic: “No, my father’s a pharoah. My mother was a concubine, I think.”
Chidder: “I thought that was some sort of vegetable.”
And:
“…the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma.”
Love TP. Just *love * him.
Just a quick reminder for those who want to play along with the (resurrected) DWRC that the next novel after Pyramids is Guards! Guards! If you haven’t gotten started on your reading yet, this is a good time to start… 
I don’t think the British Royal Family is that annoying. If anything, I suspect the focus on class is merely for the sake of “accuracy,” given that Ankh-Morpork has grown into a mirror of Victorian England/early 20th-century America, when such class distinctions were very prominent.
Interesting that I found this thread as I fairly recently picked out a book from my girlfriend’s daughters room to read on a trip and it was some strange tale called Pyramids.
I had not read any Pratchett, although I had heard of his populararity, and found this book an enjoyable enough read.
Any ideas on what I should check out next? Maybe I should start with the first book on the links in the OP.
No. Start with #4 or #6 on the list, or get a copy of Guards! Guards!. Then you can go back and read the early ones. You see, Pratchett gets better as he goes along. He started out just parodying the conventions of Sword & Sorcery books, and now he’s writing Literature.
But welcome to the Club. 
Thanks!
Guards! Guards! it is.
I’ll check the girls room (bedroom, that is. you sickos…) and then swing by the library if necessary.
I really enjoyed Pyramids. It’s been an issue for me in the past that Pratchett satirizes things about a century or so out of date, but then I just consider that people really haven’t changed fundementally, it’s just that our society has better learned what works and what doesn’t and has eliminated a few of the more egregious examples of both. For some reason, this makes me OK with it.
BTW, I want to second not starting with the early Pratchett. I really hated Color of Magic, and if I had read that first I don’t think I would have picked up any more of his books.
Pyramids is one of my all-time favourite DW novels, and I’ve never understood why it was so badly received by so many people. Sure, it’s not a book focussing on one of the Big Three (Death, Witches or Guards) but it’s a wonderful stand alone story that easily ranks with any individual DW novel.
One of the biggest reasons why I liked it is it’s still classic fantasy. It’s very much the D&D and Conan type stuff that Pratchett started with. I like the fantasy stuff, I like the use of the fantasy genre to explore aspects of the modern world. This is unfortunately something that Pratchett seems to have forgotten of late, and the most recent DW novel shave all been essentially steampunk, industrial-revolution-with-magic. More parodies of the romantic poets or Victorian horror/sci fi like Mary Shelly or Stoker than parody of fantasy. And the novels have suffered as a result IMO. In ‘Pyramids’ we still see the fantasy element strongly at play, magic is still commonplace enough that we can get the weird and the wacky without any rules. We can still get a vicious medieval society where people send their children to a school that kills them. Pyramids simply feels more fantasy than any of the later DW novels, and I enjoy that.
I’ll also second the idea that Pteppic or Chidder and especially Ptraci should have been revisited. I don’t know why such promising characters were left to rot. There are elements in those characters that potentially open up huge areas of the Discworld, both geographically and intellectually. The idea of an essentially pacifist assassin character or a travelling assassin ‘businessman’ have immense appeal to me, and I really can’t understand why it never occurred to the author to flesh them out rather than introducing banal 19th century journalists or conmen-cum-postmen. Chidder as lead character in ‘Going Postal’ would have made the story far more interesting and been a far better counterpoint to Gilt than the rather bland character we got stuck with.
My biggest criticism of Pyramids is that the ending seems tacked on. It’s like one of those movies where it’s quite clear that things have run over budget and over time so the whole thing is resolved in the last 5 minutes. Not a deus ex machina exactly, but terribly forced. Pyramid gets flared off, Dios is ‘killed’, all the undead die, Pteppic rides off into the sunset. All very unsatisfying to me because it’s all so neat.
I liked Pyramids because it showed that Pterry read Mervyn Peake.
I agree that the shifting of the DW novels (or at least Ankh-Morpork) to a more “modern” tone has changed the style of the series. On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure if that’s a bad thing; retreading the fantasy-parody genre over and over again could be a recipie for disaster (or at least boredom).
Not to skip far ahead, but “bland” is the last word I’d use to characterize Moist von Lipwig in Going Postal.
How would you have ended it? The only other possibility I can think of is having Teppic stay as pharoah and bringing Djelibebi into the Century of the Fruitbat, but given his reluctance at leading, I’m not sure if that would have been convincing…
Another silent club member checking in. That is, one who’s been reading…err, re-reading I guess…along with the threads but hasn’t had anything insightful to contribute.
Just wanted to speak up to say that I like Pyramids. Not the best book, but enjoyable nonetheless. Actually, I enjoyed Colour of Magic, Sourcery, and all the other ones that everyone constantly badmouths. Sometime I don’t feel the need to be so critical.
Looking forward to G!, G!
That’s true enough. I just think that there the series has suffered more as a result of the modernisation than it’s gained. Some of the more recent stuf like ‘Going Postal’ (which I enjoyed) or ‘Monstrous Rgeinment’ (which I didn’t) reads more like allegory than parody, and that makes it very bland. Instead of being able to throw major philospogical issues into stark relief using fantasy elemenst as we saw in ‘Feet of Clay’ or ‘Reaper Man’ we get something more like ‘Animal Farm’.
This is why I’m not a writer.
But it really did lack the character development we see in later novels, the moral sting at the end. Pteppic says he’s inhumned a whole kingdom so he’s retirng from being an assasin, but we get no sense of what, if anyhting was learned by anyone. It’s an Enid Blyton ending: “And they all went home and had scones for tea”.
Pteppic probably shouldn’t have become Pharoah, but it really needed some deeper of exploration of why he decided not to beyond general relutance. Even just the kind of ending we got with Susan at the end of ‘Soul Music’ or Dorfl at the end of ‘FoC’ would have been nice. A few short paragraphs to show that life went on but that the charcter had somehow changed, and not simply gone home for tea.
What-what-what?! No way, I loved Moist von Lipwig and I was so glad that book didn’t have any recurring main characters. I loved that book just the way it was.
A lot of people say that Mort was the first “real” Discworld novel, where all the elements that made the later books so great first came together. I’m not sure I can defend it, but I’ve always felt that Pyramids was that book, not Mort. Not the best Discworld book, but I’ve always liked it.
Hmm, I foresee a lively debate on the merits of Moist when we get around to discussing ‘Going Postal’. 20+ books ahead and I’m already in the minority.
It’ll give you time to put your argument together ;).
For some reason I don’t tend to re-read the more “stand-alone” books of the series as often as I do the others. However, I do enjoy Pyramids and the characters Pterry created in it - the Philosophers are probably my favourite minor characters.
I liked following the experiences of Teppicymon XXVII (or whatever - Pteppic’s father) as he watched himself be embalmed. And the rise of Ptaclusp’s empire and his increasing sons was very amusing.
Looking forward to Guards! Guards! and the arrival of my personal hero, Sam Vimes.
That’s exactly how I felt about Moving Pictures, but I too am getting ahead of the threads.
I just finished Guards! Guards! (for the first time) and am looking forward to the next installment…