It’s about time. With this, the third Discworld novel, I can say that Terry Pratchett has hit his stride, and I finally understand what all the fuss is about. That’s not to say their aren’t problems with this book; there are problems with every book. If we were to go around behaving as though a book—any book—were perfect, we wouldn’t be very good readers, now would we? The ending kind of sneaks up out of nowhere and becomes a giant, blazing action sequence full of bright lights and sound-effects (or descriptions of same) when the book, up until that point, had really called for no such thing. Pratchett was doing so well. Even though gender equality was the major theme of the book, Granny Weatherwax and Esk were people first and representatives of a gender second (or even third, actually), and the same could be said about the bulk of the (much less important) male characters. The story itself was mostly quiet without considerable adventure, and one got the impression that it was leading up to a coming of age kind of thing that would result in the strength of the characters resolving the plot. Instead, of course, a mostly unimportant back-story element was thrust to the fore to serve as the climactic point of conflict, and most of what had made this book much more solid and entertaining than the previous two was pushed aside so we could be given an ending straight out of Jerry Bruckheimer’s play book. That being said, however, if this book had been as weak (although lightly entertaining) as the first two, I was going to give up on the series entirely, but a slap-dash ending didn’t really spoil what was, for the first two hundred pages, a really well-executed comedy. Even though the other early Discworld novels are hard to find (the first three have been re-issued by Haper, but the others have not, to my knowledge) I will seek them out. The fantasy fans among my friends may rejoice, I am slowly turning to the Dark Side, or whatever Side it is that those folks have been bugging me to join for the better part of six years now.
Next, as I couldn’t decide what I wanted to read, I randomly pulled a book from one of my shelves and came up Looking For Jake, by China Miéville. I promise I’ll move into some capital-L Literature next, just so that this doesn’t turn entirely into a genre-fiction year (I had actually originally intended it to be the year in which I read all those classics that have been sitting unopened on my shelves, but I suppose that says something about the strength of good intentions).
