Feet of Clay

I'm glad I went ahead and bought the audio book version, so I can look forward to Nigel Planer reading me to sleep as I revisit this in the near future. Like the other City Watch books, it calls for re-reading both because of the liberally sprinkled jokes and wordplay (parsing the delights from the pure groaners is no doubt a matter of taste), but also because it's so obscure what's actually happening in the early chapters. I like going back and covering that ground again with full knowledge of the mystery.

As always, the characters are wonderful. I certainly hope to see more of Wee Mad Arthur, and Vetinari is his usual dry and calculating self in all the best ways. Once again, I'm missing Sybil, but you can't have everything.

The City Watch of Ankh-Morpork is perplexed by a series of apparently inexplicable crimes, and Lord Vetinari is being slowly poisoned in some unidentifiable way.This is the first story to make real use of golems, although they were briefly mentioned in [b:Interesting Times 386368 Interesting Times (Discworld, #17; Rincewind, #5) Terry Pratchett https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1332112344l/386368.SY75.jpg 22431183].A female dwarf not exactly rejoicing in the name of Cheery Littlebottom is recruited into the Watch. She turns out to have some expertise in alchemy, although we'd probably call it chemistry.The mystery of the inexplicable crimes is gripping, and overall this makes rather a good story, although for some reason I find it only moderately enjoyable, so I haven't reread it often. Perhaps it's rather too serious for my liking, although of course there are scraps of humour in it here and there.It's a rather complicated story, and I get to the end feeling that (a) I haven't completely understood what was going on, and (b) the author hasn't persuaded me to care quite as much about it all as he does. I like some of the regular characters, but the golems are new and my sympathy with them isn't fully engaged.Terry Pratchett evidently had a mission to persuade us that every thinking creature capable of communication is a person who deserves human rights and our full sympathy, however weird he/she/it may be. This is commendable, I suppose, but the repetition of this basic theme gets a little tiresome as he extends it to more and more different categories of creatures.