uncompleted books

[calimac]

Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (Corgi, 2003)
Every time I try a Terry Pratchett novel and find it just not very interesting, the Pratchett fans are always at hand to say, "No, you have to try this one." I've been through three or four of them this way, and this is the latest, recommended by someone at Reno for being believably from the viewpoint of a pre-teen girl. Which it may be, but it's also full of the same wearisome lame flop-sweaty attempts at humor as all the others, so I'm not going to get very far.
(Interruption: I just used my copy to swat a silverfish.)

Isaac Asimov, The Golden Door (Houghton Mifflin, 1977)
Recent perusals of Asimov's books of ancient history surprised me for being much better than I'd recalled from previous attempts (The Land of Canaan [HM, 1971], rather strangely dedicated to Arthur C. Clarke, was particularly illuminating, if you're willing to acknowledge that the Bible is not a history book), so I decided to try one of his American history books. This one covers 1865-1918. So I was a bit shocked to find it full of inaccuracies, and things I believe are inaccurate, particularly on foreign affairs. Did the Russians really sell Alaska to the U.S. rather than the U.K. because they were still pissed at the British over the Crimean War? I'd always thought it was to put a counterblock against the British, what with the NW Territories and all, being the dominant power in the region. As for "Prussia went on to annex other German states to form the German Empire" (p. 37), that's just wrong. Italy was formed by annexation; Germany was a confederation, which is why it was called an empire rather than a kingdom.

Comments

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

I am sorry that Pratchett is not for you, but tastes differ. I find him very funny, myself. But then, I personally cannot stand Douglas Adams, so I grok your annoyance that everyone else seems to see something in an author/books that you can't/don't.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Every time I try a Terry Pratchett novel and find it just not very interesting, the Pratchett fans are always at hand to say, "No, you have to try this one."

M'friend durham_rambler has been heard to observe that anyone professing a dislike for Bob Dylan is doomed to spend the rest of their lives listening to Bob Dylan, on exactly that "No, you have to hear this one" principle.

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

Thank heavens most of my friends don't CARE that I hate Bob Dylan's voice, so they don't ever make me listen to him. I'd be crazed if I had to. :-)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I like Dylan's songs OK. What I, like anderyn, can't stand is his voice, and that's not changing. I had to issue one ukase on my college roommate: No playing Dylan records when I was in the apartment. He grumbled, but didn't try to convert me.

I did once get to hear Eric Bogle playing live his anti-Dylan song. "No, no, a thousand times no / I'd rather see my life-blood spillin' / I'll sing anything, even God Save the King / But I just won't sing any Bob Dylan." When he got to the point in the story where he gives in, and sings his Dylan parody (unintelligible words in a Dylanesque whine to an all-purpose Dylan tune), we were rolling on the ground in laughter. This was at an outdoor folk festival without seating, so I do mean that literally.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I lurve Eric Bogle! Have done since I heard what I still think of as The Big Two (Waltzin' Matilda and No Man's Land) on the radio by chance thirty-some years ago. Saw him at what was almost a living-room gig just up the coast from here, him and a compatriot ("we're not Scottish, we're Australian") and maybe a dozen of us in the audience. It was fab. But I don't know his anti-Dylan song.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Here you are, enjoy!

"The Traditional Folksinger's Lament (for the Passing of the Three-Chord Traditional Folksong)"

This is a rather goofier version than the one I heard him play (a year or two before this was recorded), and it includes his regular backup musicians who weren't there when I saw him, but it's just as funny.

You know his "Nobody's Moggy Now", right?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

You know his "Nobody's Moggy Now", right?

I do indeed. And thanks for the link!

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

As with anderyn, I'm sorry you don't like Pratchett. To me, he's funnier (at his best) than Westlake (at his best). But if the humor doesn't work for you then the whole thing is going to fall flat, obviously.

But dismissing it as "lame flop-sweaty attempts at humor" is beneath you. The humor may not be to your taste, but it is real and vital humor.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"Real" and "vital" is exactly what I'm saying it is not. "Mechanical" "repetitive" and "artificial" are other terms that come to mind.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

And I am saying you are wrong, and are taking your personal taste for fact.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I am "wrong"? The humor "is real and vital"? Just who is taking personal taste for fact, now?

You compare Pratchett with Westlake. If I were asked for Westlake's funniest set pieces, by someone who didn't know his work and was curious, I'd pick the scene with the cell phone from Smoke, and the one with the state trooper and the Connecticut Turnpike from Dancing Aztecs, plus - with more hesitation, because it's ethnic humor - the description of Jeremiah "Bad Death" Jonesburg from the same book. I am not sure how well they'd work on convincing someone who'd already tried other Westlake and found it not funny, but on the more general neutral question above, that's where I'd start. So what equivalents would you pick for Pratchett?

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

OK, I confess I caught myself in my own web of words there.

H'mmm. I'd have to think about what Pratchett bits were "funniest." The real problem is that, like the Westlake scenes you mention, they need context.

Probably: the shower scene in Hogfather; the stealing-the-piano scene in Soul Music; and a complex and hard-to-describe setpiece in the Imperial Palace in Interesting Times.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I've only read a few Pratchett novels, and enjoyed them all. True, he does have an "audience is in on the joke" style closer to the wink-and-a-nod of James Bond movies rather than the outright farce of Douglas adams or Airplane. Not for everyone. I found his humor closer to PG Wodehouse or even Steven Leacock (both of whom I like) but with the pseudo-fantasy settings of [blanking on specific authors] which I can enjoy reading but don't seek out.

It's too bad about the Asimov. He was generally better about explaining the sweep of events than getting down to the nitty gritty, but those are big misses. (Though BC and Vancouver merged in 1866 and joined the 1867 Confederation a few years later. Alaska wouldn't have been English for long (or else England might have just not bothered to pay for land they couldn't manage). I haven't read the book, but will entertain the notion of still being pissed over the Crimean War. Besides, sometimes events have more than one root cause.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's another thing Asimov got wrong. He says that one reason the Dominion of Canada was formed in 1867 was to convince the U.S. that Canada was a separate country from the U.K. and therefore couldn't be sold off to pay war reparations for damages caused by British-built Confederate ships.

That sounds like nonsense to me. The Dominion was an internal federation, and its mere creation didn't change the relationship of the whole as self-governing (which they were already) colonies. The idea of Canada as a country founded in 1867, the way the U.S. is a country founded in 1776, is entirely retroactive. Actual Canadian independence was a slow process that's now legally held as occurring with a statute of 1932 which gave the dominions the right to conduct their own foreign affairs (though it wasn't seen as a mark of independence at the time) and wasn't really completed until Trudeau repatriated the constitution.

Douglas Adams, farce like Airplane? I don't see it at all, and I'm not a big fan of farce. What appeals to me in Adams is his complexly nerdish philosophy jokes.

I've never gotten into Wodehouse, but the humor isn't the problem. Taken one by one, his lines are funny. My difficulty is that I can't find a way to care about the plot or characters.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Douglas Adams and Airplane aren't the same kind of farce, but contrasted with dry humor I think they fall in the same end of the same spectrum. Not everything works for everyone, of course, and "complexly nerdish philosophy jokes" just go over the heads of some people (which is why the movie didn't have as many). Pratchett is a good plotter (which is one of the reasons so many people like him) whereas Adams is pretty good about rushing pell mell into ideas and eventually tying up the main plot threads.

I'm not going to get into Canadian history... but I'm not going to get into Russian history either. Countries sometimes do things for reasons I think are weird and/or stupid. To late to fix them now. Asimov likes to fling ideas out, and is right often enough (that is, I agree with him often enough) to keep reading.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I would call Adams' characteristic humor quite dry, though not everything funny in his books is dry. Pratchett on the other hand seems on the moderately though not extremely wet part of the spectrum.

This isn't about whether countries do weird things, or whether Asimov's speculative ideas are correct. This is about verifiable historical facts of known intentions.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

As many people have probably already told you, there are several different streams of Pratchett works. I find a lot of them very twee and not to my taste. However, I really like the Death books (starting with Mort) and the Night Watch books (starting with Guards! Guards!) -- if you haven't tried those, you might want to take a look at them.

[eddyerrol.livejournal.com]

The only Pratchett book I've read was the one he co-wrote with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens. I don't know if this book was characteristic of most of his work (especially since I don't know how much of the novel was Gaiman's contribution), but I only found it mildly amusing at best. Someone had suggested that I read it since I loved Douglas Adams's books. I didn't find it nearly as entertaining as anything by Adams.

Ed Pierce

Pratchett

[(Anonymous)]

I'd say you've gotten bad advice. If you don't like one Pratchett, you're unlikely to like any other Pratchett, as he's stylistically consistent from book to book (i.e., so far as the humor goes). In execution he runs hot and cold, and I have to say I don't think WEE FREE is one of his better ones (there are only four out of all his books I've not yet read, and the two sequels to that are two of them).*

Luckily, there are plenty of other good books out there

--John R.

*obviously, I like Pratchett. A lot.

Re: Pratchett

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My limited experience certainly agrees with your observation of Pratchett's stylistic consistency.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I thought I had posted a comment when I first read this, but evidently not. Was going to say, I love Pratchett and will not suggest any particular books of his to you. Why should you read him, any more than you should listen to Mahler, when there are writers and composers you like? :)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

To find out if I might like him given the right door, and to give him more than one try. I have several favorite composers I strongly disliked on first hearing, Carl Nielsen notable among them, and I'm glad I gave them another shot.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

That's reasonable! It sounds as though Pratchett may have had enough tries....