A Reader Is Me!

Title: Snuff
Author: Terry Pratchett
Number of Pages: 416 pages
Book Number/Goal: 3/10 for 2012
My Rating: 3/5

Summary: When Vimes takes a holiday to his wife's family manor in the country, he's expecting to be bored out of his skull, but when a goblin girl is killed, he finds himself with an investigation on his hands.

Review: This was enjoyable, but I just didn't love it. The theme of a species previously looked down upon and treated badly by humans and everyone else becoming more accepted has been used in many Discworld novels and it's really geting old. If the surrounding story is good enough, then I'm happy to go with it, but I just really found the story lacking in this. I kept putting it down and not reading for days or weeks because it just wasn't keeping me interested. I really like Vimes (I used to say he was my favorite character, but that's now Moist), but Vimes on his own is much less fun than Vimes with Vetinari and/or the rest of the Watch. I like Sybill all right, but I really dislike how anything with Vimes and Sybill together turns into all this stuff about gender stereotypes and "oh those women, how can we ever understand their ways!?" I guess that's part of Vimes' characterisation, since Pratchett doesn't do that with other female characters, but it's not something I enjoy and it makes me dislike any time Vimes is with Sybill (which was a lot of this novel). I do like Young Sam, but he wasn't in this very much. And I love Willikins. He was probably the best part.

Title: Wintersmith
Author: Terry Pratchett
Number of Pages: 295 pages
Book Number/Goal: 7/50 for 2011
My Rating: 5/5

Jacket Summary: When witch-in-training Tiffany Aching accidentally interrupts the Dance of the Seasons and awakens the interest of the elemental spirit of Winter, she requires the help of the six-inch-high, sword-wielding, sheep-stealing Wee Free Men to put the seasons aright.

Review: These Tiffany Aching books just keep getting better and better. I loved Miss Treason and her Boffo, and Annagramma. And omg Horace! Horace was the best! And I'm liking Roland, too. (And of course Tiffany and Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, as well.)

Title: The Wee Free Men
Author: Terry Pratchett
Number of Pages: 318 pages
Book Number/Goal: 1/50 for 2011
My Rating: 5/5

Jacket Summary: There's trouble on the Aching farm - nightmares spreading down from the hills. And Tiffany Aching's little brother has been stolen away. To get him back, Tiffany has a weapon (a frying pan), her granny's magic book (well, Diseases of the Sheep) - and the Nac Mac Feegle, the Weee Free Men, the fightin', thievin', tiny blue-skinned pictsies who were thrown out of Fairyland for being Drunk and Disorderly...

Review: I liked this a lot, but then I would have been surprised if I hadn't. It's Pratchett, after all. Although it is a Discworld book, it didn't really feel Discworldish to me, and I can't really explain why. I had the same feeling with The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. It's not just that it's mostly cut-off from other Discworld locations and characters... Anyway, it's a fun book and I'm looking forward to reading the rest in the series.

It's a new year and I have a new goal! While I met my goal of 75 books for last year, it was really stressful and I only managed it by reading a bunch of short books. So this year I'm just going for 50. Hopefully I'll read more than that, but if not, I won't stress it.


Title: Nation
Author: Terry Pratchett
Number of Pages: 367 pages
Book Number/Goal: 1/50 for 2010
My Rating: 4/5

Mau is the only one left after his entire village is washed away by a giant wave. The wave also washes up Daphne, who is the only survivor of a shipwreck, and the two of them have to learn to survive on their own and to help rebuild the island once other survivors start arriving.

I was hesitant about this because Pratchett is one of those white writers who tries to write about race but doesn't realise how faily he sometimes is about it. And man, I almost set this down for good quite a few times because it seemed like it was heading to a bad place. But in the end, while there were some things that didn't sit right with me (everything European/white is pretty much real/historical, but Mau and his people and that whole part of the world are made up; I could really do without any more cannibal natives in stories, even if they are the badguys and there are plenty of non-cannibal people of color; though the book is anti-colonialist, there is still some "what these people need is a honky" that slips through; etc), I'm glad I stuck with it because he totally turned around what seemed like a major fail.

I didn't enjoy this as much as his Discworld stuff, but I did like it a lot and thought Mau and Daphne were great (and I loved that they both got equal pagetime, too, so it wasn't all about the white girl, but it also wasn't all about the boy).

Title: Unseen Academicals
Author: Terry Pratchett
Number of Pages: 400 pages
Book Number/Goal: 71/75 for 2009
My Rating: 5/5

Ponder Stibbons discovers that the university will lose a large bequest if they don't have a football team. The wizards are unsurprisingly reluctant, but when he tells them it will affect the food budget, they decide football can't be that bad.

In addition to the wizards we all know and love, this introduces several new characters who work at the university, with three of them (Glenda, Trev, and Nutt) being the main POV characters. There are also several other new minor characters and I especially liked Pepe, the dwarf who might not be a dwarf.

This was a bit of a slow starter, but once it got going, I found it really hard to put down. I could have wished for a bit more Vetinari, but I loved him when he did show up. I loved the new characters, especially Glenda, who was awesome and a nice surprise, as I was expecting a book about the university to be a mostly male cast. Which it was, but she was the character we spent the most time with.

The whole thing with Nutt was kind of awkward. I liked him a lot and the history was neat, but I wish he'd stop the racism metaphors.