Ronde de nuit (2002)

Með betri bókum Pratchetts um Diskheim. Sam Vines, yfirmaður Næturvarðanna, er að kljást við raðmorðingja sem er kolklikkaður (eðlilega) og drepur sér til skemmtunar Næturverði borgarinnar, þegar þeir báðir kastast aftur í tíma þegar íbúar Ank-Morphok er á suðupunkti og borgararnir undirbúa byltingu gegn klikkuðum og ofsóknaróðum kóngi. Allar gjörðir til góðs og slæms hafa afleiðingar en Tímamunkarnir keppast við að halda hlutum innan marka. Skemmtileg og spennandi. ( )

The chief of the Discworld city watch wants to get Back to the Future.

3/4 (Good).

It has an engrossing story, although there aren't any surprises. It's not very funny. Enough silliness to lighten the mood but not enough to get a laugh seems to be pretty standard for the City Watch books - which is fine by me, I'd much rather have a good story than a joke. However, most of the better characters are barely in this one.

And it spends a lot of time relating Vimes' personal philosophies, which are off-putting. Besides being generally pro-cop (and yes, he's a cop, that's unavoidable, but does he have to spend so much time going on about it?), there are also such gems as an argument against gun control, and a lot of excitement for the death penalty.

(Feb. 2022) ( )

I'm probably not doing this book justice with my rating, but as much as I think the writing is brilliant, it dragged for me badly.

I started it thinking it would work for my werewolf square in bingo, and by the time I realised it definitely wasn't (Agula the werewolf is only mentioned and never appears), it was too far in to stop.

This is a much deeper, more serious storyline that any of the other Discworld books I've read so far and there's a lot of political philosophy (and a fair amount of quantum physics). It's brilliant political philosophy, but I was expecting werewolves, so Poli-Phi and string theory was more work than I was prepared for. (Also, I'm not a fan of time travel plots.)

Still, this is Pratchett and as MT said, for a book I was complaining was hard work to get through, I was laughing out loud an awful lot. Pratchett is a genius at using his words, and the scene involving the ox and the raw ginger had tears coming to my eyes (and likely theirs). So many laugh out loud moments in this one that even though I'm glad it's over, I'm definitely also glad I've read it.

(Luckily, there are enough other elements in this book that I can use it for the Free Space.) ( )

Night Watch is the 29th novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and the 6th of the City Watch sub-series. Sam Vimes goes on a timey-wimey adventure into Ankh-Morpork and the City Watch's past landing in the middle of major historical events in the city.

"And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up."

Time travel is one of my least favorite tropes in fantasy. Thankfully that is not the focus of the story, though there is plenty of fretting over changing the future by altering the past. Instead it is the story of the events that shaped young Sam Vimes into the old Sam Vimes we've grown to love over five previous books by, err, himself. Or something. There's definitely a time loop involved.

That bit of head scratching logic aside, this is a surprisingly poignant read and not the story I was expecting for a Watch novel. Pratchett has some insightful things to say about society, policing, government and duty that feels extremely relevant in these trying times. I don't know how Pratchett does it. This story is both disturbing in how real it is and comforting for the hope it provides. ( )

Huh, go figure. Just as the 28th book in this long-running series took a (what I believe to be terrible) left turn, this very next one also took an unexpected turn, and is a darker and more violent book than any of the previous 28.

And it's also an extremely good one. Probably top five in the series so far. The laughs are still there, the humour as biting and witty as ever, but there's this whole other level of depth that Pratchett delivers this time around.

I will say I was actually reluctant to read the next one in the series because of how much I disliked [b:The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents|34534|The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Discworld, #28)|Terry Pratchett|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1168566225l/34534._SY75_.jpg|1179689], but this one completely restored my faith. ( )