Sean > Recent Status Updates

'Wildfire in Manhattan'. This was always going to draw comparisons to Neil Gaiman, but particularly in a book edited by him. Started well but resolved itself a little too quickly. Didn't have the mystery & feeling of historical weight I like in Gaiman's god stories, but we can blame that on the length, mostly. Not that I'd want something in his style. I think Harris could do this well in a novella length story.

Good but a little oddly written? Or maybe some of the editing was off- there a few sections where words appeared to be missing. The 'quotes' read a bit like a pretentious writing/philosophy majors diary. Interesting and a bit creepy.

That story ended on an 'and then what happened' note. Hope they aren't all too open ended. I liked it well enough. Not a big fan of alternate forms of communication dialogue. Speech marks already exist, darn it!

I laughed aloud at the description of Chava eating and the resultant conversation with the rabbi. I'm enjoying this book. It's slow but nice. It feels like more of an exploration of people and life than a story, so far. I do hope that the djinn's arc won't contain a pregnancy, though. That might feel like a cliché.

My favourite witches book so far. I love the characters and I liked the story more this time. I remembered pieces of this one quite distinctly before rereading the series, though it's got mixed up with something else. Maybe the rest happens later? Or in another series entirely.

Very, very short. It seems almost unfair that it should add to my read count. It was enjoyable. I really do love Death, so I guess it's a good thing 'Reaper Man' is up next for a (re)read.

There's more that I haven't read than I'd thought. I never knew how Gaspode came to be and I still don't know how he comes to talk again.

I'm enjoying this one more than the other direct parodies so far. It might be because I took a break from the series and read a few other books in between. Maybe I should do that every few Discworld books from now on.

It makes the dialogue feel like it's been lifted from a clever sitcom.

There was also a weird moment where two men pity a woman for not knowing who 'The Three Stooges' are and that felt a bit weird.

Neither of these are too major and they shouldn't take away from some otherwise great characterisation and emotionally engaging story.

But

I was energetically invested in this book. I was as close to cheering at the end as you can be in the middle of the night.

It was better written than I remember Redshirts being, though that might be because Redshirts had more dialogue, which is the biggest complaint (still small) I have with this book. All the 'good' (and some other) characters in this are 'staircase wit' levels of clever.

I liked elements of this but I found it a little too convoluted. The heavy concentration of (similar) names made the history of the story somewhat difficult for me to understand. I'm not good with names in movies/books. It's fine when it's a fleshed out character, but when it's just the name some I'm hopeless.

Some shoddy paragraphing and dashes in this edition.

This felt more like an intermission from the rest of the series than it's own book. I think the Rincewind series is my least favourite Discworld arch but it's still fun enough.

Not sure why I didn't finish this already. There was only one story left. I did wait to see if I could listen to whatever song one of the stories requested, but that was weeks ago.