Tag: terry pratchett

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents & Only Human

Read The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett years ago, the day it first came out in Canada. I went to the bookstore, bought it, went to the food court and finished it before I got home.

A couple years ago I got the audiobook, which is good but it was a couple ipods ago and I lost my place, so I figured for my challenge it would do perfectly (Book 63, I am now working on book 67).

It’s technically set in the Discworld, but except for a mention of some wizards and it taking place in Uberwald, it’s not a big detail.

The plot is Maurice, a talking cat, a bunch of talking mice, and a stupid looking kid are running a Pied Piper scheme and end up in a town where something really creepy is afoot. And there’s a girl named Malicia who likes to make up stories. In the audiobook she’s got this great sort of Transylvanian accent, which isn’t actually in the book beyond where she comes from, so I had to mentally put it there as I read.

Maurice is great narrator. He’s very much a cat, with cat priorities. And the rats are forming their own civilization bit by bit, and learning what it really means to think. It’s a pretty solid piece of kid’s fiction, and again if you’re worried about needing to know about the Discworld series, it’s not even relevant.

I also read Only Human by Tom Holt which was aggressively mediocre mixed with casual racism. And thus, Only Human has been rated a D.

Truckers

To clear the bad taste out of my brain, for book #50 I chose one I knew I’d like: Truckers by Terry Pratchett.

It’s a problem solving book. The Nomes have a problem: their home sucks. So they get on a lorry and see where they end up next, which turns out to be a place full of more nomes. These nomes live in a giant department store and don’t believe in the outside and it’s rather idyllic.

Except it’s going to be demolished.

There’s also a small box from space telling them what to do, and the joy of this book is the solutions the nomes come up to for their problems, in-between their arguing (nomes love to argue).

Masklin, the main character, suffers a bit from the sort of ‘good, but just kinda there’ lead problem that Pratchett’s books sometimes have, but I liked him a lot anyway. But my favourite part of the book was that unlike A Spell for Chameleon, women were suddenly people again.

And just for that, this book makes me so happy. I blew right through it, I was enjoying myself so much. It’s part of a series, the Bromeliad Trilogy, and the next book is Diggers, followed by Wingers.

The Carpet People and Pokemon: Diamond and Pearl vol 1


The Carpet People written by Terry Pratchett age 17 and Terry Pratchett age 43.

This book was originally published when Terry Pratchett was 17 and then once the Discworld series started picking up in popularity, they went to him and said ‘hey, we’re going to publish that book you wrote when you were a teenager’ and Pratchett wisely did what I’ve wanted to do with my old stuff: He rewrote the fuck out of it.

I’m pretty curious what the original one was like. In the author’s note he says that it was written back when he thought fantasy was all about kings and battles, and the book I read was a lot of musing on civilization and the difference in people. Also, everyone living in a carpet. The biggest city in it is the size of a period.

It’s a thinky book mixed around trying to survive an incoming group of people/animals called the Moul (which means ‘one true human’) who eat animals. Look at their name. In-between this, there’s a roving natural disaster called The Fray that is followed by Moul attacks. The Munrungs, a hunter tribe, must survive and generally find a nice place to live after Fray hits their home.

It’s a decent book, but I wish there’d been more women in general. There’s a good effort near the end, but more speaking parts/doing parts is always appreciated in a book.

In other news, on the recommendation of Ann Larimer and the fact that Pokemon Adventures won’t have another volume out until September, I ordered the 8-volume set of Pokemon Diamond Pearl Adventures, which is a different continuity (Pokemon Adventures follows the trainers of the game in order with their own adventures) and is a lot looser in writing and style than the main series.

But so far I’ve learned that Professor Rowan, who is not actually the main character Hareta’s grandfather and I have no idea how he has custody, is the worst person to have custody of a child ever. Please look at the pictures below to see what I mean.


Just gonna leave a toddler in the woods and walk away. It’s all good.

PS: Read Castle Waiting vol 2 by Linda Medley and it was glorious. Excellent comic.

Johnny and the Bomb


Johnny and the Bomb by Terry Pratchett

The last of the Johnny Maxwell trilogy! Johnny and the Bomb takes Johnny from helping videogame aliens (Only You Can Save Mankind), helping out ghosts (Johnny and the Dead) to straight up time travel. It all starts because Johnny was determined to help the local homeless woman after finding her in a bad case in an alley (first chapter spoiler: She had set off an unexploded bomb back in the ’40s).

It was definitely the best one of the series, which makes the fact it ends there kind of worse. The characters were getting all nice and developed and Johnny was finally developing a personality (but one scene especially proves it would have been better with him being a girl instead of a white guy looking on.)

There’s an emotionally painful scene in the book, involving Yo-less (who is black) and the racism back then, except it’s not the people who did it that hurt him so much as one of his friend’s reaction to it and it was rather on the nose.

Anyway, it was fun YA, but I still haven’t recovered enough to read The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane yet.

I read three Diana Wynne Jones stories last night when the streets flooded and I was trapped at my dad’s, but I’ll talk about that later when I’ve composed my thoughts vis a vis ‘how much is Earwig and the Witch to be blamed on the fact it’s a posthumous book?’

Johnny and the Dead


Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett

Second book in the Johnny Maxwell trilogy changes nothing about my requests for some changes to the protagonist, but it’s significantly smoother than the first, Only You Can Save Mankind. In this one Johnny goes from leading an alien race to safety to helping out the local dead in the town graveyard.

It has some good philosophical bits, a lack of Kirsty (that’s not a good thing), and the usual cute interactions between Johnny and his friends, who are still twelve. It isn’t until the next book coming up, Johnny and the Bomb, where they finally get to upgrade to thirteen and get seriously involved in the adventures besides thinking Johnny’s a bit strange.

In Johnny and the Dead, Johnny starts seeing dead people, and then the dead people start realizing they can do a lot more than lay around waiting for judgement day. Wackiness ensues.

I’m actually halfway into the third and final book of the trilogy, which I thought I’d be done by now but grandparents came over and one must entertain ones grandparents or they start biting.

Only You Can Save Mankind


From ‘Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett, first in the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy

I’ve been reading a lot lately and forgetting to, well, mention it. A lot of it’s been comics (I heartily recommend Castle Waiting by Linda Medley, Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong by Prudence Shen and Faith Erin Hicks, and of course I’m super excited they’re publishing the Ruby and Sapphire arc of Pokemon FINALLY. There is something satisfying I can’t even explain about seeing the games in art the way they were in my head. Also, the Ace Attorney comics are surprisingly pleasing! This has been a long sidetrack.) which aren’t as easy to review, but the books have been pretty good for the most part.

Read some Christie, Poirot’s Early Cases as well as And Then There Were None, both of which I really enjoyed. The second creeped me out pretty good in parts. The basic plot is, people are summoned mysteriously to a house and then they start dying.

Right before the above quoted book, I was reading The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo which is about a porcelain toy rabbit who is loved very much by a little girl, but doesn’t care about her. One day he’s lost at sea and ends up passing through the ownership of people he comes to care for very much and anyway, I had to shut that book down in the middle while I was reading because it made me start crying on an airplane. Considering I was also suffering from pretty bad food poisoning, I felt I’d alarmed my seatmate enough for that ride.

Kate DiCamillo wrote Tale of Despereaux, which remains one of the best books I ever read, and this one isn’t disappointing. When I found her other books were available as ebooks, they got boosted way the hell up on my to-read list, but are now officially ‘do no read in front of other people’ books.

Right after shutting down the book to regain composure, I had to choose another book and fast to switch gears. I chose Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett, a YA book he wrote early on. His early stuff is kind of dire, but it was just what I needed. It’s full of interesting character descriptions and a fun videogame story with an alien race I like.

The only problem was the main character, Johnny Maxwell who was inoffensive but so generic that once he started interacting with the girl in the story I started desperately wishing he was Janie Maxwell because at least I wouldn’t feel like I was reading about a cookie cutter protagonist and it would have made parts of their interaction a lot less urgh to read.

I’m starting on the next book in the trilogy now, Johnny and the Dead which ominously starts off with Terry Pratchett explaining Pal battalions.