No, be sirius.
Ha! - Ha!
Thanks for the correction - it’s been a while… :o
DARK IN HERE, ISN’T IT?
:d :d :d
I wonder how the first two books would feel were they printed as a single unit. I’d probably have ended up happier with the first, forgetting that things were a leeetle rough there in the middle.
I love the Luggage.
Things definitely smooth out in this book. The read is longer, but I didn’t feel a sort of mental fatigue after finishing that I did after the first book. After a while, for me, humor that’s sort of overlaid on material rather than springing from it organically can start to tax my brain. It’s rather like sitting at a table next to someone who will randomly turn and poke you in the arm. One of the things that I generally like about British humor as opposed to American is often that organic development, the inevitability of the detail from the first act paying off in a gag in the third–which is something that Douglas Adams and PG Wodehouse really excelled at. American humor seems to lack some of that circularity, depending on a more linear progression of gags. In that way, these first two books have an “American” feel. Less “Fawlty Towers.” More “Airplane!”
I didn’t like the first two books because there were too many plot threads intoduced and discarded without a second mention. Nothing seemed coherent, and characters mainly went willy-nilly along without much thought. Here are a few things from this book that didn’t go anywhere:
The wizard that cursed the moving shop owner, where is he now?
The witch’s house made of candy that was going to be a tourist attraction
The turtle arrives to see the birth of her babies, where’s the father? Why doesn’t she lay the eggs? What’s going on?
Twoflower leaving is very anti-climactic
Why do the spells have to be said to make the eggs hatch?
What happened to Weatherwax?
I like the book, mainly the stuff about Cohen. I’ve never really enjoyed Rincewind, but the luggage is supercool and I want one. I’m looking forward to reading Equal Rites again, but I have to admit that I don’t think the Discworld series is coherent until Wyrd Sisters.
I got finally round to (re)reading TLF. I like the density of ideas***** and don’t have a problem with the various loose ends.
I’d forgotten how vicious the luggage is. I’d completely forgotten about the star people and Dahoney’s speech:
I like it that it’s not all just gags
Though I’m probably missing loads of gags since I loath fantasy fiction* and would miss any references.
******Except Discword, obviously.
I’ll take the opposite tack; disrupting the story to take time to spell out all these plot details would have ruined the book, IMO. The first two entries, for instance, are nothing more than background fodder – they don’t play any critical role to the plot, and diving into great detail about them would have just wasted time (and pages).
I’m currently 2/3rds of the way through Equal Rites myself, and it’s pretty hard reconciling the Granny Weatherwax there with the Granny who shows up in later novels…
I just finished the most recent edition of the Discworld companion. There is a short interview with Pratchett at the end of the book. He resolutely refuses to discuss what happens to the water that goes over the rimfall. I think the narrativium that the disc abounds in makes the question moot. The water is there because it needs to be there in order to be an ocean. The how it gets there or never runs out doesn’t matter. The disc has an edge therefore there must be a rimfall. An ocean has water in it therefore the ocean never runs dry. The rest is just detail for the bean-counters that Pratchett do despises.
I know, I’m way late on joning these threads, but I just had to chime in.
I’m revisiting these via audiobook, having read them in regular book form a couple of times each in the past, but this is the first time I’ve ever gone through them in actual order. Looking forward to seeing how things evolve.
Pterry’s style does seem a bit uneven in this and TCoM. In fact, there are times at the beginning of TLF that he sounds rather Douglas-Adams-ish. Not that I think that’s particularly bad in and of itself, it’s just that his style is so much more distinctive later on.
Great puns and jokes and, unlike the first one, a single narative thread throughout. Wondeful stuff.
Oh, and as for the phot of Death’s place…
So it’s Rincwind that checks the picture, not Twoflower. And “things too horrible to say” doesn’t come up specifically.
It’s funny, actually, because the description of Death’s place stays relatively consistant in later books, IIRC. Odd that one of the few things that doesn’t change as the series progresses is something that isn’t what we think it is, anyway.
thwartme