Sunday, May 6, 2007

Discworld Double Feature

I'm a little behind on my reviewing lately (three books) so I'm going to combine the two Discworld books I just read into one review. The last review on Discworld pretty much said in general what they are like anyway.



Night Watch was a Vimes book, and it was probably one of the better Discworld books (but then, Vimes is one of my favorite Discworld characters). In this book, Vimes is chasing a criminal and both he and the criminal get taken to the time of a revolution that occurred in the past when Vimes was just starting out in the Watch. The criminal kills Vimes's mentor when he arrives so now it's left to Vimes to teach himself everything he knows. It was hilarious and it was fun to see some of the characters as their younger selves.

9/10



Monstrous Regiment had brief appearances by Vimes and William de Worde from The Truth, but the main character was a young woman from Borogravia named Polly who has not appeared in any of the previous Discworld books. The Borogravians follow the teachings of a rather unreasonable god by the name of Nuggan, whose teachings state that women should not dress like a man. In order to find her brother during a time of war, Polly disguises herself as a man by cutting her hair and using a pair of socks to make herself look more "manly" and joins the army. This is more serious than most of the Discworld books and doesn't have as many lines that make you crack up as most of them do, but I loved the themes of gender and religion (and don't get me wrong, it is still funny and very enjoyable).

8/10

I looked up whether or not there was a date for the next Discworld book on Amazon yesterday, and it says the next book Making Money will be available on October 1, 2007. I believe I read in an interview with Pratchett that this book includes the characters from Going Postal and they do something similar for the banking system as they did for the postal system in that book.

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