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I WAS WRONG, I CANNOT EMPHASIZE HOW HORRIBLY WRONG I WAS AT WHAT HAPPENS

it is painfully obvious, I mean that’s why it’s called foreshadowing, that the narrator is gonna tell Hassan to give him the last kite, because he thinks it is what will enable his father Baba’s love. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s my feeling.

“Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses”

Another story about a spirit but this one is more up front. It’s from the ghost’s perspective but the narrator knows that he is a ghost, and he is trying to get the roses that… his childhood playmate?? Has been placing on his shrine?? Again, the cricket appears, and seems to be an apparatus of ghosts who are trying to move in the spiritual realm.

“The Woman Who Came At Six O’Clock”

Jose the restaurant owner loves a prostitute who comes into his restaurant every day. She’s agitated; we are told she is not her usual self. As he confesses his love to her she is charmed but also uses this to charm her… because she has likely murdered a client who terminally disgusted her and she needs a half hour alibi.

“Eyes of a Blue Dog”

This story is cool. A man and a woman meet in dreams. She is looking for him in the waking world by repeating the phrase “eyes of a blue dog” and writing it everywhere. He forgets everything that he dreams, so every time they meet he is hearing everything for the first time, so he can never act on her hopes and dreams. A parable for a certain relationship dynamic, perhaps?

“Bitterness For Three Sleepwalkers”

Another surreal story documenting the dissolution of an apparently old woman. The cricket has been a prominent motif in these tales about the precipice of death and dying. A large part of this one focuses on the narrator realizing, too late I suppose, the humanity of the subject and the resulting shred of empathy he has.

“Dialogue With the Mirror”

Echoes of “The Other Side of Death” as the subject is a man who is contemplating the death of his twin, but this is a bit less introspective and more trying to skirt a subject that the MC is trying to avoid. Is the false image in the mirror an accusation? Did this man murder his twin? Or is he contemplating his suicide? What is going on here???

“Eva is Inside Her Cat”

This is another story about someone on the verge of death. In this one, the dead woman becomes a spirit and then tries to possess her cat, only to discover once she musters the effort that time passes at an incredibly different pace for a ghost, with a sort of “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” vibe. I am really liking the head space of this early phase of Márquez’s weird fiction.

“The Other Side of Death”

Sort of a companion piece to “The Third Resignation” where a man goes through an existential crisis after the death of his twin, examining his own mortality through a variety of angles, from the cancer that killed his brother to his existence as a twin, two halves of a whole, to his brother’s death as a physical representation of his own.

“The Third Resignation”

More of a prose poem about a boy who died at the age of seven and then was kept alive if inert for eighteen more years before finally crossing over from the living to the dead. This story is mostly about the psychodrama of being a conscious corpse. It’s only when he is comfortable with being dead that he dies, but once he dies he believes he’s alive and doesn’t want to be buried.

“Death Constant Beyond Love”

A Senator throws his political legacy away to conduct an affair with a young woman who was sent by her father as a way of securing a political favor. The only reason the senator agrees is because he is dying and has thus far refused the comfort of other human beings in his lonely suffering, not having told his wife or children of his terminal illness.

“The Sea of Lost Time”

A beautiful, bizarre story about a town that becomes influenced by a scent off the ocean breeze, something like nostalgia. When the philanthropist shows up and starts paying people money to do what they do best, the focus changes, and it’s way weirder when he takes Tobias out to swim in the ocean, discovering cosmological facts about the dead and, I suppose, where time goes.

“The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother”

This poor girl is one of Márquez’s tales of cruelty in One Years of Solitude. An overworked girl is blamed for burning down her grandmother’s manor and the horrid woman forces her granddaughter to prostitute herself in order to pay off a debt of 1,000,000 pesos.

Yeah, like, I appreciate this book but it’s missing a certain something, either in how little agency any of its characters seem to have or how long the authors spend in soliloquizing satire.

I wonder how much of the meandering of the prose is a product of Gaiman trying Pratchett’s prose style on considering that he had only written short fiction and comic books up until this point.

I like this book, it’s funny, but I think that it’s too scatterbrained. I think it’s the fact that it’s about inevitable Armageddon so the characters don’t feel like they have a whole lot of agency, apart I guess from Crowley, who has stolen the show with his escape from Hastur and Ligur.

how on earth did I end up on a book edition with zero pages :gonk:

OH. It took awhile to get to how exactly the meandering Adam gets to imagine Armageddon, but it’s good. The diversion about the witch finders and Agnes’s pyrrhic death is darkly humorous.

okay I wasn’t entirely sure how this story was gonna spin out of control but it seems that a lot of it right now is that lovable Adam, the 12 yr old antichrist, is unknowingly altering the world with his adventurous imagination. How this is aligned on a crash course with the four horsemen, idk. I am also eager to see how Good Omens Death compares with Discworld Death.

It’s been great fun so far. Pratchett skewering the contemporary as well as Christianity (kind of) has been a fun change from fantasy-setting-parody that occasionally grapples with Big Ideas. Azriphale and Crowley are a great odd couple.

on one hand I don’t doubt that Gaiman was involved with this book. I just think that so much of the prose style between the two is so complementary that you only get Gaiman from the bits that feel nastier than typical Discworld, like musing on the unknown future of Baby B or the rundown of the horseman (one horsewoman?) of the Apocalypse, particularly War.

in retrospect, Harry getting Sirius as a godfather and then not being able to move out from the dursleys is some Pottercore BS

YESSSSSSS THE UNVEILING OF THE PETER PETTIGREW PLOT

Like, bad things are happening around Harry, but they aren’t unilaterally focused on him. I think this is why I was so off-put by the Goblet of Fire; Harry is the worlds most special boy because everyone believes that Sirius Black is out to kill him. Yeah, it puts him in special focus, but this book would have been way more annoying if he had been given overbearing wizard bodyguards a la Dobby.

This is a great book for foreshadowing beyond plot twists as Harry comes to several beliefs that he is going to come to doubt (like about the wizard death penalty), because of what he is led to believe about Black. Lupin has a more pragmatic point of view, but he is in a position where he can afford to, being some 12 years distanced from (and not being quite so familiar with) James and Lily’s murders.

TCoC needed more moments like The Marauder’s Map where Harry got a bit of levity. All the awful misdirection about Black is fine because it doesn’t directly stymie Harry apart from the threat of the Dementors and it’s leading to a huge, great moment, even if I was so pissed at TOotP that I said I was done with the series. These are like completely different books on reread when you know what they build to.

Ron, clearly Crookshanks is trying to make you happy. He is EATING SPIDERS to prove his regard for you. It’s not like he dropped it in his lap or anything!!

The book focusing more on Hermione and Ron butting heads over “familiars” and Hermione being pissed at Trelawny gives Harry some welcome breathing room.

the f’n time turner is one of the most outrageous things in this entire series, the sort of thing that makes you question the cosmological elements of the wizarding world. Like, SPOILERS, but having a time travel device and allowing it to be used for what it is in THIS particular book is insane.