Bringing Sexy back from the store
Ok. This really is going to be the last time I buy an iPod until 2010. I get a lot more use out of the bastards than I do out of the digital camera which cost me twice as much, so I really shouldn't complain. But I do, because they're expensive and so shiny and small and needing to replace them every so often is really annoying.
Of course, the fact that I bought the extended warranty helps. Even if it's effectively only going to save me forty bucks when my Shuffle randomly quits on me right after the '08 election.
Pratchett Alert! Pratchett Alert!
Pyramids... It was OK, I suppose. Funny-but then, even The Color of Magic was funny. And it had an interesting theme of the perils of stagnation and doing things because This Is The Way We've Always Done Them, something which he'll go on to do with far more interesting results in Monstrous Regiment. And it's great to see the inner workings of the Assassin's Guild. But overall, he didn't do much more than entertain with this one.
Guards! Guards! is much better. I forget if he'd already invented one of his most well-known ideas in (say) Sourcery (that a million-to-one chance is almost certain to work), but it's a great one, and the image of the guards trying to make sure a shot is exactly crazy enough to work is one that is going to stick with me. There's a lot more life here than there was in Pyramids, which (again) was good, but hardly fantastic. I can see why Vimes et all are fan favorites: they're just working men, trying to make safer a city that as a rule feels perfectly capable of making itself safe, thank you very much. Actually, Ankh-Morpork itself is really coming together nicely.
Also, the Patrician makes everything better. I've got an advanced reader of Making Money in the Stack o'Books that I'm saving for the plane down to DC, and I can't wait to see how he's scheming to keep Ankh-Morpork humming now.
Three more library books to read in about a week. I'm not sure I can do it, but if I fail, I'm going down reading.
Couldn't get into Assassin's Apprentice, though. Maybe I should just start again from the beginning.