The Colour of Magic: Part Four, "Close to the Edge" + End of Book Discussion

[Lulu]

Spoilers for the first half here! Any spoilers for later books/characters, please put in spoiler tags.

What are you impressions of the of the book as a whole? What do you like/not like? If this is a reread, have you picked up on anything you didn't the first time around?

[Josh]

What a goofy book. I enjoyed it, but having read guards guards it is cool to see how he has grown as a writer.

Overall I really liked the book. there were some transitions between scenes where I got a little lost, and I had to read the end a couple times and still do not know what happened.

It was very clever and fun to read. I loved the invisible dragons and the circumfence.

[Ryan]

When I finished this maybe just over a month ago, I really enjoyed it. Its had been a while that I'd read something with such a good sense of humour.

A problem I had with it, is that it finished very abruptly, which doesn't really get fixed until the next one with The Light Fantastic.

Josh wrote: "What a goofy book."
Yeah, I imagine the Discworld series will only get goofier, too.

[Kaitlyn]

The water troll thing was interesting. I'd like knowing more about his home world.

One of my favorite things is that Rincewind is such a unique lead character. He's a coward. It's so much more relatable. I might pretend I could be tough in a scary situation (like so many lead characters in recent books), but I'd probably panic in reality.

[Joshua]

Rincewind's cowardice is essentially his superpower.

[Anirban]

At this stage, Pratchett was still doing straight up parody of the fantasy genre, so the whole point of Rincewind's cowardice is a play on the whole "chosen one" trope that pulp novels employ. Rincewind would much rather NOT be the hero, but he's the chosen one, so he keeps bumbling into saving the world.

[Lulu]

Ah, if it weren't for this readthrough, I doubt I'd ever had mustered up the energy to start on Discworld books, and boy am I glad I have now. I know this and The Light Fantastic are meant to be the weakest books (or, at least, not completely in the Discworld style), but I thought they were brilliant.

The man knows how to parody, which is hard to do without things becoming a bit of a clusterfuck, to be honest (I'm not a huge fan of parody in literature, anyway). Rincewind was definitely a great character, and yes, I loved the way it was all on him - not on the intrepid traveller Twoflower, not on the macho and brave barbarian Hrun, but silly little Rincewind.

Also, I liked his play on the trope of the ol' "that which should not be named" with the spell, and the constant breaks of tension because of it.

[Joshua]

One of my favorite parts of the book was the way magic was used to create Twoflower's technology. It's akin to the dinosaur vacuum or record player from The Flintstones. Rincewind's supposition that those things *should* be different than magic, is also amusing.

They hydrophobic wizards were a very unique concept. Along with the imaginary dragons, maybe the most inventive aspect of the book.

[Ian]

Question: Do we know what language they're speaking for most of the book? Because Pratchett dropped the thing about Twoflower needing his book or Rincewind to translate for him after the first section. Perhaps I'm overthinking it.

And now I have 'Radioactive' by Imagine Dragons playing in my head, darn it.

[Lulu]

No, I don't think it's mention. I did like that there were English words peppered in for comedy (in-sewer-ants etc.). I wonder! Definitely seems to be somewhat monolingostical (sp?) though. Despite mentioning so many different languages when first approaching Twoflower, we see here and in the next book that everyone else seems to understand Rincewind and the crew.

[Ryan]

In the movie Twoflower admits to knowing the Morpork tongue, but states that tourists should always use their phrase-book.

No idea if that was expressed in the book, it was long past that I started to wonder why everyone could understand Twoflower all of a sudden.

[Christina]

Joshua wrote: "One of my favorite parts of the book was the way magic was used to create Twoflower's technology. It's akin to the dinosaur vacuum or record player from The Flintstones. Rincewind's supposition tha..."

I agree that even though this is the first Pratchett book I have read so far, I think he has an incredible imagination. So creative! Can't see what else he comes up with :)

[Christina]

Lulu wrote: "Ah, if it weren't for this readthrough, I doubt I'd ever had mustered up the energy to start on Discworld books, and boy am I glad I have now. I know this and The Light Fantastic are ..."

I was getting a lot of Harry Potter vibes with the "that which should not be named." I wonder if Rowlings ever read this book!?

I also was really impressed with this book considering it's known as one of the weakest books in the series. It only gets better from here? Awesome!