Eagerly awaiting this downloading to my kindle tomorrow. Who else is going to be devouring this? I love the Sam Vimes books, so have high expectations for this
Amazon UK has despatched my copy overseas already, so it should be here tomorrow or the next day. I have to maintain my collection of First/First/UK Pratchett or I would have gone the Kindle route.
We’ll see if it is better than Unseen Academicals, which I didn’t like at all.
Unseen read better for me the second time through, but yeah, not one of the strongest
My copy dropped two days ago, and I’ve only been able to read at bedtime, but this is really good so far.
I’ve already laughed out loud enough to wake the dogs and Mrs.Lebeef.
I’m looking forward to this. I didn’t particularly enjoy Unseen, but he was on good form with I Shall Wear Midnight, definitely the best of the Tiffany Achings for me.
I know this is a bit off topic, but do we know when Terry Pratchett is…going to die? I thought he was going to finish some books, then end his own life due to his illness. Is he planning on finishing the Discworld series somehow?
Unknown at this time. There are still some books in the pipeline IIRC. Scouting For Trolls and Raising Taxes, for example.
I got an early copy and read it last week. It’s very good; classic Pratchett, a bit of a return to form. Sam Vimes is one of his best characters, and Snuff is up there with Pratchett’s best. I saw no signs of Pratchett’s intellect failing, and I expect he’s got at least a few more years and a few more good books in him.
When I checked the reviews on Amazon yesterday, some were good and some were bad—and most of the bad ones seemed to be complaining about crappy formatting on the Kindle edition.
Yeah, the kindle formatingcan be abit of a pain. mostly in droppedspaces between words.
That’s interesting - my advance copy was an EPUB which I converted to MOBI and read on my Kindle, and the formatting was fine.
Somehow, it doesn’t surprise me that Amazon’s official version was more error-prone than the copy I made on my home computer using freeware. I don’t know what they’re doing - and it occurs to me it may be an artefact of their DRMed version of MOBI, the AZW - but errors in official Amazon versions of ebooks are pretty common.
Could be a brilliant anticopy trick, like inexistant streets on maps - if the file you’ve got has shitty formatting and five tyops a page, they can prove in court that it’s theirs !
Mine arrived on my Kindle yesterday afternoon, Australia time - would’ve been 12:01am on the 13th, not bad. I didn’t notice any typos, and only a little odd formatting. The latter was after I changed my font size from the default, so that probably caused it.
I’ve just finished it. Better than Unseen Academicals, but not as good as Thud. Overall, I found it rather meandering, with an odd pacing.
A few more specific thoughts:
I’m quite annoyed by the Dark continuing to affect Vimes - I thought that he had dismissed it and the end of Thud!. It was also, more or less, acting as his ally; that strikes me as anathema to the established Vimes character
The goblins just don’t work for me. I’m not sure why, but I think that it’s partially because the race has just been plopped down into the middle of the established ecology, starting with the last book. Trolls, dwarfs, etc had all been in several books, and characters and storylines regarding/involving those races had grown and developed a little more organically. Not so with goblins, and their premier in Unseen
I enjoyed it. There were some very sweet moments with depth hidden in the comedy. That is what makes a good Pratchett to me. I definitely loved seeing more of Young Sam. He’s adorable.
I just finished listening to it on audio.
I quite liked it, better than I liked Unseen Academicals. I liked Sam Vimes here, I liked bloody-minded Willikins and poo-obsessed Young Sam. I loved the domestic scenes between Sam and Sybil (sharing a bath!!)
I agree that the goblin story wasn’t really that well developed, and Sgt. Colon & Nobby were just thrown in just because.
Did I miss an appearance by Death in this book? I don’t remember one, but I was anxious to get through it. Aren’t there very few DW books where Death fails to make an appearance?
I was…uneasy about a plot point.
Pterry has in the past poked fun at the “even if it is horrible, it’s ok because it’s cultural” PC school of thought, and this book had sort of overcompensated
with " it’s horrible but necessary, and cultural, and actually OK because of complicated metaphysical reasons"- which I felt was…not like Pterry at all.
In the the past, horrible but necessary would have been all that would have been said, and that would actually have been OK with me.
Discworld has always been a very humanist world- and that just seemed…oddly spiritual.
I’m only a third of the way through and loving it. The electronic readers present an unusual issue regarding Pratchett’s books, in that all those little additions and side-notes at the bottom of the ‘pages’ in a real book become linked numbers in the text…and I haven’t figured out how to get BACK to what page i was on once I’ve clicked to go read the add-on. It’s frustrating. But I’m loving the character development, especially of his ‘gentleman’s gentleman’.
I have a question about Vimes’ past, which I’ll put in spoilers just in case.
In whicht book did Vimes gain his ‘Darkness’ ability? It sounds familiar but I can’t recall just when he gained this. It’s from the Valley of Koom days, I know, and I remember reading about that, but…for some reason it just feels like I missed something somewhere.
On a Kindle (the kind with a keyboard), you just push the Back button. Surely there’s a way on other e-readers…?
I have a jailbrook Nook color and use the Aldiko reader. going back just brings me to the previous page of footnotes for some reason. There is likely a way I’m just not seeing right now.