November is halfway over, and I haven't finished bookblogging for October yet; so there follows a series of hasty write-ups for books which would have got longer reviews without travel and pressure of other work.

Equal Rites is the first really political Discworld book; The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic are forensic parodies of various ( Read more... )

Latest of the Vimes sub-series of Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett; once again, as in Thud, he takes Vimes out of Ankh-Morpork and the story is the better for it. I really enjoyed the combination of toilet humour (because poo is always funny) with cold clinical rage against racial injustice; I got a little lost with some of the topography of the ( Read more... )

One of Pratchett's earlier YA novels, about a 12-year-old boy who is an enthusiastic player of computer games, which was very much enjoyed by my 12-year-old son who is an enthusiastic player of computer games. Although Pratchett apologises in the introduction of the 2004 edition for how the story has dated since the original 1993 publication, I ( Read more... )

As I had hoped, an excellent novel rounding off the Tiffany Aching series, with a surprise appearance from someone we last saw much earlier in the Discworld stories. It deals with some pretty heavy subject matter in Pratchett's trademark combination of humour and profundity. Some day soon I shall go back and read all four Tiffany novels in sequence ( Read more... )

Full list is here (SFWA) or here (Tor).

The good news: Terry Pratchett at long last gets a nod, though the Andre Norton Award rather than a Nebula proper. Three out of five Nebula winners for written fiction are women. Rachel Swirsky, who turned 29 last month, is the first Hugo or Nebula winner to have been born in the 1980s, and the youngest ( Read more... )

Comments on my not totally effusive post on Good Omens have revealed that my tastes are not the same as everyone's (I know, imagine my surprise, etc). There is of course only one possible way to establish definitively which are the best novels by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and that is to conduct a poll. So without further ado: ( poll )

Although I'm a fan of both Pratchett and Gaiman, I don't quite get Good Omens, which seems to me to have the two writers not so much reinforcing each others' talents as toning them down. I did laugh out loud at the footnotes about firelighters and decimal currency, but I have to say that the book itself is rather a footnote in its authors' careers ( Read more... )

I managed to get to most of three days of the Discworld Convention in Birmingham last weekend; it was great fun as I expected. The headline for me was that Terry Pratchett himself is looking and sounding very well. I saw him speak at the opening ceremony on Friday and the "Man in the Hat" interview on Saturday, and my friend D won the draw to meet ( Read more... )

I think this was the only remaining Discworld novel which I had not read; the first of the subset primarily aimed at younger readers. Maurice, slightly to my surprise, turns out to be a talking cat, associated with a group of talking rats who have acquired intelligence accidentally. As ever with Pratchett, it is funny and humane, with a touch of ( Read more... )

This was for some reason the only main sequence Discworld novel that had so far escaped me (I also have TAMAHER on the shelf). I guess it must be a relatively early book in the series; the undead are still rather unusual in Ankh-Morpork, and Ridcully appears to be a newish arrival at Unseen University (and the Bursar is fairly sane). I got a lot of ( Read more... )