The witches have returned from their trip to Genua and are settling back
into their lives in Lancre. Magrat Garlick is going to marry King Verence
who used to be a Fool and is now the King. And crop circles keep turning
up all over the place. Plus there is a new contingent of young girls
dressed in black who want to be witches to plague Granny Weatherwax. She
has her hands full since the crop circles are a sign that the Lords and
Ladies, euphemism for Elves, are trying to come back.

This one wasn’t as good as the previous witch books by Pratchett. There
are some funny bits, like Magrat wandering around the castle bored out of
her mind. And there is the long ago story of Mistrum Ridcully and Granny
Weatherwax. And the Librarian has a humorous part to play. But Pratchett
wasn’t at his best, which means the book is still wonderful, just not so
funny you have to stop reading to let the tears clear from your eyes.
Anything with Granny Weatherwax is worth the time.

Buy it, read it, enjoy!

Terry
Pratchett has a new book out, called Night Watch.
Predictably it’s about Sam Vimes. I’ve just started reading it to
Jane; I’ll post a review when we’re done.

Today I spent most of the day at home with a sick kid. She called me
shortly after I got to work and way before I had consumed enough coffee
to face the spreadsheets I had planned on tackling this morning. Anyway,
when I got her home, medicated with Tylenol and tucked in, the couch
called me. Loudly. But, of course, any really fine nap is preceded by a
short read in a good book so I picked up my son’s copy of Witches
Abroad and started in. And two hours later I finished it. So much for
napping.

This is another Pratchett book about Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and
Magrat Garlick. After Desiderata, the good fairy godmother, placidly dies
leaving her magic wand to Magrat, they must travel to the city of Genua
to prevent the marriage of the girl to the handsome prince. Along the way
they take the magic out of just about every fairy tale told to children.
It reminded me of the spot on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show called
“Fractured Fairy Tales” that I loved as a child. And Pratchett has this
way of writing that includes little comments that are hysterically funny.
There’s one about panty girdles that I had to put the book down til my
eyes quit tearing up from laughing so hard. His nod to Tolkein is a
hoot, too.

As always with Pratchett books, buy them, read them, enjoy!

Just the other night, David and I finished reading Prince
Caspian together. It was lovely: Lewis’ prose is a joy to read
aloud, just flowing off of my tongue effortlessly. For comparison,
after even a couple of pages of Redwall I was tired and ready
to stop. Part of the difference is that Redwall is written in
a cinematic style; it’s as though a camera is following the characters
around. Lewis, on the other hand, is an old-fashioned story-teller.
Where it’s appropriate to be terse and just tell us something, he does
so without dramatizing it. But that’s not the whole difference; Lois McMaster
Bujold writes in a cinematic style, and her prose is also lovely
to read aloud. I dunno.

I’d never Prince Caspian aloud before, or so slowly
(one chapter a night), and so I’d never really noticed what an odd
book it is. It’s supposedly about Prince Caspian’s efforts to regain
his throne from his usurping Uncle Miraz with the aid of “Old Narnia”
(the Talking Beasts, dwarves, woodnymphs, and of course Peter, Susan,
Edmund, and Lucy). And yet the central conflict in the book has nothing
to do with Caspian at all. Morally speaking, the book is about Lucy and
her willingness to follow Aslan’s guidance even if it means angering her
siblings, or even leaving them behind. Lewis
devotes the better part of three chapters to it, in what is (after all) a
very short book. And upon reflection, it becomes clear that Caspian’s
victory and the salvation of Narnia are both rooted in Lucy’s courage in
following Aslan in the face of stern opposition. Interesting.

This is a reprise of a character Block created in the 60’s, fast
forwarded into the late 90’s. I haven’t read the rest of the series with
Evan Tanner so perhaps my critique is not valid but I found this whole
book just plain cheesy.

Ok, so maybe that is a little harsh. Evan Tanner is brought back to life
after a Swedish Nationalist splinter group puts him into a cryonic coma
because they want him out of the way and yet, being highly evolved
humans, don’t want to kill him. Yeah, right. After springing from his
hospital bed with no side effects except a tendency to be chilly, he goes
back to his old apartment, which is still there after 25 years, and finds
his name on the doorbell. And the child he had taken in has grown up into
a breathtakingly gorgeous woman who home schooled herself without anyone
noticing and kept his apartment for him. Yeah, right. Then we get to
watch as Tanner “catches” up on the happenings of the last 25 years via
Internet which only takes 6 months because he doesn’t have to sleep. His
sleep center has been destroyed by shrapnel in the Korean war. Yeah,
right. So somehow, he finds himself going to Burma on some lame scheme
for some guy he worked for all those years ago. Now th e book turns from
sci fi to thriller and we get to watch Tanner walk thru Burma with this
bombshell chick he picked up, both of them posing as Buddhist monks and
no one stops them. James Bond, eat your heart out.

The whole book is cheesy, lame and just plain silly in parts. I finished
it, though, which says something.

Being at home sick for a day, I put the Burton bio aside for awhile and
picked up this, the penultimate volume in O’Brian’s long, long saga.
I’ve gotten the impression from little things I’ve seen here and there
that many fans don’t think much of it; and to be fair it never really
seems to catch fire. Plus, O’Brian did some really obnoxious things.
The book begins with a passing mention of the death of Stephen’s wife
Diana; and toward the end another of my favorite continuing characters is
killed with hardly any notice taken–and to no literary end that I can
see.

Apart from that it’s a pleasant enough book; lots of nautical to-ing and
fro-ing about the Mediterranean Sea and a few nice sea battles, with the
escaped Bonaparte floating about Europe and a complicated Islamic plot to
help him back into power. Of course, by the time Aubrey succeeds in
forestalling said plot Wellington has succeeded in defeating Bonaparte at
Waterloo, rendering the whole thing rather moot.

I have some suspicions on where O’Brian might have been going. I say
“might have been”, because I haven’t yet read the final book,
Blue at the Mizzen, and because he had just begun writing a
subsequent book when he died. But in the previous book,
The Yellow Admiral, Stephen meets a lovely woman, a
naturalist in her own right, and the wife of the governor of Sierra
Leone. Though she doesn’t appear in this book she’s mentioned a number
of times; and it’s rather pointedly mentioned that (1) the governor has
just died, and (2) the marriage was not as happy as it appeared to be,
and in fact was never consummated. It begins to look as though O’Brian
was getting Diana out of the way, so as to interest Stephen in somebody
new.

So I’m quite curious to see what happens in Blue at the Mizzen,
a book about which I’ve heard none of the unpleasant little whispers. But
that’s a tale for next month.