Roxy

been wanting to get into discworld ever since i read good omens for the first time like, a decade ago, and i'm so glad i did.

i really understand why people don't want newcomers to start with this one. i decided to because release order is the order any fan who has been into it since the beginning had to read it, and i wanted to experience the series that way, but it does just throw you right into the middle of wacky situations. confusing lingo, and a pretty wild format, but here's the thing - i LOVE that. i love sci-fi and and fantasy that has worldbuilding and characters and events solely for the sake of theme and tone, and this feels like peak that to me. i don't care if everything i'm reading can be neatly categorized and placed into an encyclopedia, just hit me with it! also don't make the characters act like they've never encountered normal things in their universe.

this first discworld book does neither of those things and i love it for that, and i'm very excited to keep reading them and get to the ones the fans consider better than this!

i read this in preparation to watch the film so i could listen to the new KINGCAST and follow along! and... i liked it! a good amount! it was a fun dystopian story with a future that's pretty recognizable to our own. a single narrative focus, which i'm really fond of. a pretty compelling (if sort of standard, boring, not NEW by any means) main character. a really good length! and a pretty tense format, what with the counting down throughout all of the chapters.

some complaints: i would have liked some more scenes centered around trying to evade the hunters, as opposed to the standoff format that came a little over halfway through. everything between ben starting out and him taking whatshername hostage was really tense, and while the rest of it was still pretty tense, i wanted a little more of the before parts.

also, king's prose just gets a little tiresome at some points. especially when it's about a COMPLETELY fictional world. it's easy to just completely lose track of what he's saying. sometimes i'm into that, but i feel like it just didn't really fit in with the character he created here? and one thing that always strikes me is it that feels like he writes narration like it's from the point of view of the character it's focusing on. and in this case, his weird rambling paragraphs didn't really fit. neither did the racism/homophobia, either. it's easier to excuse when it's characterizing a negative person (even though i don't particularly care for it then, either) but it just didn't make sense to me for ben, here.