Thief of Time is the 26th Discworld novel and the last Death novel,
although he still appears in subsequent books. It's the third book
starring Susan Sto Helit, so I don't recommend starting here.
Mort is the best starting point for the
Death subseries, and Reaper Man provides
a useful introduction to the villains.
Jeremy Clockson was an orphan raised by the Guild of Clockmakers. He is
very good at making clocks. He's not very good at anything else,
particularly people, but his clocks are the most accurate in Ankh-Morpork.
He is therefore the logical choice to receive a commission by a mysterious
noblewoman who wants him to make the most accurate possible clock: a clock
that can measure the tick of the universe, one that a fairy tale says had
been nearly made before. The commission is followed by a surprise
delivery of an Igor, to help with the clock-making.
People who live in places with lots of fields become farmers. People who
live where there is lots of iron and coal become blacksmiths. And people
who live in the mountains near the Hub, near the gods and full of magic,
become monks. In the highest valley are the History Monks, founded by Wen
the Eternally Surprised. Like most monks, they take apprentices with
certain talents and train them in their discipline. But Lobsang Ludd, an
orphan discovered in the Thieves Guild in Ankh-Morpork, is proving a
challenge. The monks decide to apprentice him to Lu-Tze the sweeper;
perhaps that will solve multiple problems at once.
Since Hogfather, Susan has moved from
being a governess to a schoolteacher. She brings to that job the same
firm patience, total disregard for rules that apply to other people, and
impressive talent for managing children. She is by far the most popular
teacher among the kids, and not only because she transports her class all
over the Disc so that they can see things in person. It is a job that she
likes and understands, and one that she's quite irate to have interrupted
by a summons from her grandfather. But the Auditors are up to something,
and Susan may be able to act in ways that Death cannot.
This was great. Susan has quickly become one of my favorite Discworld
characters, and this time around there is no (or, well, not much)
unbelievable romance or permanently queasy god to distract. The
clock-making portions of the book quickly start to focus on Igor, who is a
delightful perspective through whom to watch events unfold. And the
History Monks! The metaphysics of what they are actually doing (which I
won't spoil, since discovering it slowly is a delight) is perhaps my
favorite bit of Discworld world building to date. I am a sucker for
stories that focus on some process that everyone thinks happens
automatically and investigate the hidden work behind it.
I do want to add a caveat here that the monks are in part a parody of
Himalayan Buddhist monasteries, Lu-Tze is rather obviously a parody of
Laozi and Daoism in general, and Pratchett's parodies of non-western
cultures are rather ham-handed. This is not quite the insulting mess that
the Chinese parody in Interesting Times
was, but it's heavy on the stereotypes. It does not, thankfully,
rely on the stereotypes; the characters are great fun on their own
terms, with the perfect (for me) balance of irreverence and
thoughtfulness. Lu-Tze refusing to be anything other than a sweeper and
being irritatingly casual about all the rules of the order is a classic
bit that Pratchett does very well. But I also have the luxury of ignoring
stereotypes of a culture that isn't mine, and I think Pratchett is on
somewhat thin ice.
As one specific example, having Lu-Tze's treasured sayings be a collection
of banal aphorisms from a random Ankh-Morpork woman is both hilarious and
also arguably rather condescending, and I'm not sure where I landed. It's
a spot-on bit of parody of how a lot of people who get very into "eastern
religions" sound, but it's also equating the Dao De Jing with
advice from the Discworld equivalent of a English housewife. I think the
generous reading is that Lu-Tze made the homilies profound by looking at
them in an entirely different way than the woman saying them, and that's
not completely unlike Daoism and works surprisingly well. But that's
reading somewhat against the grain; Pratchett is clearly making fun of
philosophical koans, and while anything is fair game for some friendly
poking, it still feels a bit weird.
That isn't the part of the History Monks that I loved, though. Their
actual role in the story doesn't come out of the parody. It's something
entirely native to Discworld, and it's an absolute delight. The scene
with Lobsang and the procrastinators is perhaps my favorite Discworld set
piece to date. Everything about the technology of the History Monks, even
the Bond parody, is so good.
I grew up reading the Marvel Comics universe, and Thief of Time
reminds me of a classic John Byrne or Jim Starlin story, where the heroes
are dumped into the middle of vast interdimensional conflicts involving
barely-anthropomorphized cosmic powers and the universe is revealed to
work in ever more intricate ways at vastly expanding scales. The Auditors
are villains in exactly that tradition, and just like the best of those
stories, the fulcrum of the plot is questions about what it means to be
human, what it means to be alive, and the surprising alliances these
non-human powers make with humans or semi-humans. I devoured this kind of
story as a kid, and it turns out I still love it.
The one complaint I have about the plot is that the best part of this book
is the middle, and the end didn't entirely work for me. Ronnie Soak is at
his best as a supporting character about three quarters of the way through
the book, and I found the ending of his subplot much less interesting.
The cosmic confrontation was oddly disappointing, and there's a whole
extended sequence involving chocolate that I think was funnier in
Pratchett's head than it was in mine. The ending isn't bad, but
the middle of this book is my favorite bit of Discworld writing yet, and I
wish the story had carried that momentum through to the end.
I had so much fun with this book. The Discworld novels are clearly
getting better. None of them have yet vaulted into the ranks of my
all-time favorite books there's always some lingering quibble or sagging
bit but it feels like they've gone from reliably good books to more
reliably great books. The acid test is coming, though: the next book is a
Rincewind book, which are usually the weak spots.
Followed by The Last Hero in publication order. There is no direct
thematic sequel.
Rating: 8 out of 10
I'm a bit behind on both free software maintenance and on writing reviews,
what with one thing and another, but hopefully will have time to catch up
next month. Meanwhile, publishing continues and books keep catching my
eye.
Blake Crouch (ed.) Forward (sff anthology)
Kate Elliott The Keeper's Six (sff)
Ruthanna Emrys A Half-Built Garden (sff)
R.F. Kuang Babel (sff)
Seanan McGuire The Unkindest Tide (sff)
Seanan McGuire A Killing Frost (sff)
Seanan McGuire When Sorrows Come (sff)
Seanan McGuire Be the Serpent (sff)
Terry Pratchett Thief of Time (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Last Hero (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
(sff)
Terry Pratchett Night Watch (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Wee Free Men (sff)
Terry Pratchett Monstrous Regiment (sff)
I keep hearing amazing things about Babel, so it's very high on the
list.
First up is Minidebconf Tamilnadu 2023 that would be held on 28-29 January 2023. You can find rest of the details here. I do hope we get to see/hear some good stuff from the Minidebconf. Best of luck to all those who are applying.
Tinnitus
During the lock-down of March 2020, I became aware of noise in ears and subsequently major hearing loss. It took me quite a while to know that Tinnitus happens to both those who have hearing loss as well as not. I keep running into threads like this and as shared by someone nobody knows what really causes it. I did try some of the apps (an app. called Resound on Android) that is supposed to tackle Tinnitus but it hasn t helped much. There is this but at least for me, right now pretty speculative. Also this, and again highly speculative.
Cooking
After mum passed away, I haven t cooked anything. This used to give me pleasure but now just doesn t feel right. Cooking is something you enjoy when you are doing for somebody else and not just for yourself, at least that s how I feel and with that the curiosity to know more recipes. I do wanna buy a wok at sometime but when, how I just don t know.
Books
Have been reading books quite a bit. And due to that had to again revisit and understand ISBN. Perhaps I might have shared it before. It really is something, the history of ISBN. And that co-relates with the book I read, Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett. Raising Steam is the 40th Book in the Discworld Series and it basically romanticizes and reminisces how the idea of an engine was born, and then a steam engine and how actually Railways started. There has been a lot of history and experiences from the early years of Steam Railway that have been taken and transplanted into the book. Also how Railways is and can be successful if only it is invested wisely and maintenance is done. This is only where imagination and reality come apart as maintenance isn t done and then you have issues. While this is and was in the UK, similar situation exists in India and many other places around the world and doesn t matter whether it is private or public. Exceptions are German, French but then that maybe due to Labor movements that happened and were successful unlike in other places. I could go on but then it will become a different article in itself. Suffice to say there is much to learn and you need serious people to look after it. Both in UK and India we lack that. And not just in Railways but Civil Aviation too, but again that is a story in itself.
Web-series
Apart from books, have been seeing web-series that Willow is a good one that I enjoyed even though I hadn t seen the earlier movie. While there has been a flurry of movies and web-series both due to end of year and beginning of 2023 and yet have tried to be a bit partial on what I wanna watch or not. If it has crime, fantasy, drama then usually I like it. For e.g. I saw Blackout and pretty much was engrossed in what will happen next. It also does lead you to ask questions about centralization vs de-centralization for both power and other utilities and does make a case for communities to have their utilities apart from the grid as a fallback. How do we do over decades or centuries about it is a different question perhaps altogether. There were two books that kinda stood out for me, the first was Ian Rankin s Naming of the Dead . The book is about a cynical John Rebus, a man after my own heart. I am probably going to buy a few more of his series. In a way it also tells you why UK is the way it is right now. Another book that I liked was Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde. This is one of the books that Mum would have clearly liked. It is pretty unusual while at the same time very close to 1984 and other such dystopian novels. The main trope of the book is what color you can see and how much you can see. The main character is somebody who can see Red, around the age of 20. One of the interesting aspects of the book is de-facting which closely resembles the Post-Truth world where alternative facts can be made out of air and they don t need any scientific evidence to back them up. In Jasper s world, they don t care about how things work and most of the technology is banned and curiosity is considered harmful and those who show that are murdered one way or the other. Interestingly, the author has just last year decided to start book 2 in the 3 book series that is supposed to be. This also tells why the U.S. is such a precarious situation in a way. A part of it is also due to the media which is in hands of chosen few, the same goes for UK and India, almost an oligopoly.
The Great Escape
This is also a book but also about experiences of people, not in 19th-20th century but today that tells you slavery is alive and well and human-trafficking as well. This piece from NPR tells you about an MNC and Indian workers. What I found interesting is that there barely is an mention of the Indian Embassy that is supposed to help Indian people. I do know for a fact that the embassies of India has seen a drastic shortage of both people and materials even since the new Govt. came in place that was nine years ago. Incidentally, BBC shared about the Gujarat riots 2002 and that has been censored in India. They keep quiet about the UK Govt. who did find out that the Chief Minister was directly responsible for the killings and in facts his number 2, Amit Shah had shared that we would do 2002 again in the election cycle barely a month ago. But sadly, no hate speech FIR or any action was taken against Mr. Shah. There have been attempts by people to showcase the documentary. For e.g. JNU tried it and the rowdies from ABVP (arm of BJP) created violence. Even the questions that has been asked by the Wire, GOI will not acknowledge them.
Interestingly, all India s edtechs have taken a beating in the last 6-8 months including the biggest BJYU s. Sharing a story from 2021 where things were best and today all of them are at bottom. In fact, the public has been wary as the prices of the courses has kept on increasing and most case studies have been found to be fake. Also the general outlook on jobs and growth has been pessimistic. In fact, most companies have been shedding jobs truckloads, most in the I.T. sector but other sectors as well. Hospitality and other related sectors have taken a huge beating, part of it post-pandemic, part of it Govt s refusal to either spend money or do any positive policies for either infrastructure, education, medical, you name it, they think private sector has all the answers which has been proven to be wrong again and again. I did not want to end on a discordant note but things are the way they are
The Truth is the 25th Discworld novel. Some reading order guides
group it loosely into an "industrial revolution" sequence following
Moving Pictures, but while there are
thematic similarities I'll talk about in a moment, there's no real plot
continuity. You could arguably start reading Discworld here, although
you'd be spoiled for some character developments in the early Watch
novels.
William de Worde is paid to write a newsletter. That's not precisely what
he calls it, and it's not clear whether his patrons know that he publishes
it that way. He's paid to report on news of Ankh-Morpork that may be of
interest of various rich or influential people who are not in
Ankh-Morpork, and he discovered the best way to optimize this was to write
a template of the newsletter, bring it to an engraver to make a plate of
it, and run off copies for each of his customers, with some minor
hand-written customization. It's a comfortable living for the estranged
younger son of a wealthy noble. As the story opens, William is dutifully
recording the rumor that dwarfs have discovered how to turn lead into
gold.
The rumor is true, although not in the way that one might initially
assume.
The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.
This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It's also wrong.
There's a fifth element, and generally it's called Surprise.
For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing
it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that
the hard way works.
The dwarfs used the lead to make a movable type printing press, which is
about to turn William de Worde's small-scale, hand-crafted newsletter into
a newspaper.
The movable type printing press is not unknown technology. It's banned
technology, because the powers that be in Ankh-Morpork know enough to be
deeply suspicious of it. The religious establishment doesn't like it
because words are too important and powerful to automate. The nobles and
the Watch don't like it because cheap words cause problems. And the
engraver's guild doesn't like it for obvious reasons. However, Lord
Vetinari knows that one cannot apply brakes to a volcano, and commerce
with the dwarfs is very important to the city. The dwarfs can continue.
At least for now.
As in Moving Pictures, most of The Truth is an idiosyncratic
speedrun of the social effects of a new technology, this time newspapers.
William has no grand plan; he's just an observant man who likes to write,
cares a lot about the truth, and accidentally stumbles into editing a
newspaper. (This, plus being an estranged son of a rich family, feels
very on-point for journalism.) His naive belief is that people want to
read true things, since that's what his original patrons wanted. Truth,
however, may not be in the top five things people want from a newspaper.
This setup requires some narrative force to push it along, which is
provided by a plot to depose Vetinari by framing him for murder. The most
interesting part of that story is Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip, the people hired
to do the framing and then dispose of the evidence. They're a classic
villain type: the brains and the brawn, dangerous, terrifying, and willing
to do horrible things to people. But one thing Pratchett excels at is
taking a standard character type, turning it a bit sideways, and stuffing
in things that one wouldn't think would belong. In this case, that's
Mr. Tulip's deep appreciation for, and genius grasp of, fine art. It
should not work to have the looming, awful person with anger issues be
able to identify the exact heritage of every sculpture and fine piece of
goldsmithing, and yet somehow it does.
Also as in Moving Pictures (and, in a different way,
Soul Music), Pratchett tends to
anthropomorphize technology, giving it a life and motivations of its own.
In this case, that's William's growing perception of the press as an
insatiable maw into which one has to feed words. I'm usually dubious of
shifting agency from humans to things when doing social analysis (and
there's a lot of social analysis here), but I have to concede that
Pratchett captures something deeply true about the experience of feedback
loops with an audience. A lot of what Pratchett puts into this book about
the problematic relationship between a popular press and the truth is
obvious and familiar, but he also makes some subtle points about the way
the medium shapes what people expect from it and how people produce
content for it that are worthy of
Marshall McLuhan.
The interactions between William and the Watch were less satisfying. In
our world, the US press is, with only rare exceptions, a thoughtless PR
organ for police propaganda and the
exonerative tense. Pratchett tackles that here... sort of. William
vaguely grasps that his job as a reporter may be contrary to the job of
the Watch to maintain order, and Vimes's ambivalent feelings towards
"solving crimes" push the story in that direction. But this is also
Vimes, who is clearly established as one of the good sort and therefore is
a bad vehicle for talking about how the police corrupt the press.
Pratchett has Vimes and Vetinari tacitly encourage William, which works
within the story but takes the pressure off the conflict and leaves
William well short of understanding the underlying politics. There's a
lot more that could be said about the tension between the press and the
authorities, but I think the Discworld setup isn't suitable for it.
This is the sort of book that benefits from twenty-four volumes of
backstory and practice. Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork cast ticks along like a
well-oiled machine, which frees up space that would otherwise have to be
spent on establishing secondary characters. The result is a lot of plot
and social analysis shoved into a standard-length Discworld novel, and a
story that's hard to put down. The balance between humor and plot is just
about perfect, the references and allusions aren't overwhelming, and the
supporting characters, both new and old, are excellent. We even get a
good Death sequence. This is solid, consistent stuff: Discworld as a
mature, well-developed setting with plenty of stories left to tell.
Followed by Thief of Time in publication order, and later by
Monstrous Regiment in the vaguely-connected industrial revolution
sequence.
Rating: 8 out of 10
In 2022, much to my surprise, I finished and reviewed 51 books, a
substantial increase over last year and once again the best year for
reading since 2012. (I read 60 books that year, so it's a hard mark to
equal.) Reading throughout the year was a bit uneven; I avoided the
summer slump this year, but still slowed down in early spring and
September. As always, the tail end of the year was prime reading time.
The best book of the year was the third and concluding book of Naomi
Novik's Scholomance series, The Golden Enclaves. I thought she nailed the ending of an
already excellent series, propelling it to the top ranks of my favorite
fantasy series of all time. I'm a primarily character-driven reader, and
El's first-person perspective was my favorite narrative voice in a very
long time. The supporting characters are also wonderful (Liesel!).
Highly recommended.
Fiction highlights of the year were plentiful. It started off strong with
Natalie Zina Walschots's cynical and biting superhero novel
Hench and continued
in a much different vein with Guy Gavriel Kay's
Children of Earth and
Sky, which has a bit less plot focus than some of his other fantasies
but makes up for it in memorable character relationships. Ryka Aoki's
Light from Uncommon
Stars is a moving story of what it means to truly support someone else
and should have won the best novel Hugo. And, finally, Miles Cameron's
Artifact Space was a
delight; one of the best military SF novels I've read in a long time.
There was no true stand-out non-fiction book this year, but the first book
I finished in 2022, Adam Tooze's
Crashed, is now my
favorite story of the 2008 financial collapse, in large part because he
extends the story to the subsequent European financial crisis. Jo
Walton's collection of book discussion columns,
What Makes This Book
So Great, also deserves a mention and is guaranteed to add to your
reading backlog.
My large review project of the year was finally making substantial inroads
into Terry Pratchett's long Discworld series. That accounted for eight of
the books I read this year, and is likely to account for a similar number
next year since I'm following the
Tor.com Discworld re-read. I
think my favorite of that bunch was
Maskerade, but I
also enjoyed all of the Watch novels in the group
(Feet of Clay,
Jingo, and
The Fifth
Elephant).
My other hope for the year was to mix in older books from my reading
backlog and not just focus on new (to me) acquisitions. A little bit of
that happened, but not as much as I had been hoping for. This continues
to be a goal in 2023.
The full analysis includes some
additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.
The Fifth Elephant is the 24th Discworld and fifth Watch novel, and
largely assumes you know who the main characters are. This is not a good
place to start.
The dwarves are electing a new king. The resulting political conflict is
spilling over into the streets of Ankh-Morpork, but that's not the primary
problem. First, the replica Scone of Stone, a dwarven artifact used to
crown the Low King of the Dwarves, is stolen from the Dwarf Bread Museum.
Then, Vimes is dispatched to berwald, ostensibly to negotiate increased
fat exports with the new dwarven king. And then Angua disappears,
apparently headed towards her childhood home in berwald, which
immediately prompts Carrot to resign and head after her. The City Watch
is left in the hands of now-promoted Captain Colon.
We see lots of Lady Sybil for the first time since
Guards! Guards!, and there's a
substantial secondary plot with Angua and Carrot and a tertiary plot with
Colon making a complete mess of things back home, but this is mostly a
Vimes novel. As usual, Vetinari is pushing him outside of his comfort
zone, but he's not seriously expecting Vimes to act like an ambassador.
He's expecting Vimes to act like a policeman, even though he's way outside
his jurisdiction. This time, that means untangling a messy three-sided
political situation involving the dwarves, the werewolves, and the
vampires.
There is some Igor dialogue in this book, but
thankfully Pratchett toned it down a lot and it never started to bother
me.
I do enjoy Pratchett throwing Vimes and his suspicious morality at
political problems and watching him go at them sideways. Vimes's
definition of crimes is just broad enough to get him fully invested in a
problem, but too narrow to give him much patience with the diplomatic
maneuvering. It makes him an unpredictable diplomat in a clash of
cultures way that's fun to read about. Cheery and Detritus are great
traveling companions for this, since both of them also unsettle the
dwarves in wildly different ways.
I also have to admit that Pratchett is doing more interesting things with
the Angua and Carrot relationship than I had feared. In previous books, I
was getting tired of their lack of communication and wasn't buying the
justifications for it, but I think I finally understand why the
communication barriers are there. It's not that Angua refuses to talk to
Carrot (although there's still a bit of that going on). It's that
Carrot's attitude towards the world is very strange, and gets
stranger the closer you are to him.
Carrot has always been the character who is too earnest and
straightforward and good for Ankh-Morpork and yet somehow makes it work,
but Pratchett is doing something even more interesting with the concept of
nobility. A sufficiently overwhelming level of heroic ethics becomes
almost alien, so contrary to how people normally think that it can make
conversations baffling. It's not that Carrot is perfect (sometimes he
does very dumb things), it's that his natural behavior follows a set of
ethics that humans like to pretend they follow but actually don't and
never would entirely. His character should be a boring cliche or an
over-the-top parody, and yet he isn't at all.
But Carrot's part is mostly a side plot. Even more than
Jingo, The Fifth Elephant is
establishing Vimes as a force to be reckoned with, even if you take him
outside his familiar city. He is in so many ways the opposite of
Vetinari, and yet he's a tool that Vetinari is extremely good at using.
Colon of course is a total disaster as the head of the Watch, and that's
mostly because Colon should never be more than a sergeant, but it's also
because even when he's taking the same action as Vimes, he's not doing it
for the same reasons or with the same stubborn core of basic morality and
loyalty that's under Vimes's suspicious conservatism.
The characterization in the Watch novels doesn't seem that subtle or deep
at first, but it accumulates over the course of the series in a way that I
think is more effective than any of the other story strands. Vetinari,
Vimes, and Carrot all represent "right," or at least order, in overlapping
stories of right versus wrong, but they do so in radically different ways
and with radically different goals. Each time one of them seems
ascendant, each time one of their approaches seems more clearly correct,
Pratchett throws them at a problem where a different approach is required.
It's a great reading experience.
This was one of the better Discworld novels even though I found the
villains to be a bit tedious and stupid. Recommended.
Followed by The Truth in publication order. The next Watch novel
is Night Watch.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Wayland
First up, I read Antoine Beaupr s Wayland to Sway migration with interest. While he said it s done and dusted or something similar, the post shows there s still quite a ways to go. I wouldn t say it s done or whatever till it s integrated so well that a person installs it and doesn t really need to fiddle with config files as an average user. For specific use-cases you may need to, but that should be outside of a normal user (layperson) experience.
I have been using mate for a long long time and truth be told been very happy with it. The only thing I found about Wayland on mate is this discussion or rather this entry. The roadmap on Ubuntu Mate is also quite iffy. The Mate Wayland entry on Debian wiki also perhaps need an updation but dunno much as the latest update it shares is 2019 and it s 2022. One thing to note, at least according to Antoine, things should be better as and when it gets integrated even on legacy hardware. I would be interested to know how it would work on old desktops and laptops rather than new or is there some barrier? I, for one would have liked to see or know about why lightdm didn t work on Wayland and if there s support. From what little I know lightdm is much lighter than gdm3 and doesn t require much memory and from what little I have experienced works very well with mate. I have been using it since 2015/16 although the Debian changelog tells me that it has been present since 2011. I was hoping to see if there was a Wayland specific mailing list, something like debian-wayland but apparently there s not :(. Using mate desktop wayland (tried few other variations on the keywords) but search fails to find any meaningful answer :(. FWIW and I don t know the reason why but Archwiki never fails to amaze me. Interestingly, it just says No for mate. I probably would contact upstream in the coming days to know what their plans are and hopefully they will document what their plans are on integrating Wayland in both short-term and long-term with an update, or if there is something more recent they have documented elsewhere, get that update on the Debian wiki so people know.
The other interesting thread I read was Russel Coker s Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 entry. I would be in the market in a few months to find/buy a Thinkpad but probably of AMD rather than Intel because part of recent past history with Intel as well as AMD having a bit of an edge over Intel as far as graphics is concerned. I wonder why Russel was looking into Intel and not AMD. Would be interested to know why Intel and not AMD? Any specific reason ???
Hearing Aids
I finally bought hearing aids about a couple of weeks back and have been practicing using them. I was able to have quite a few conversations although music is still I m not able to listen clearly but it is still a far cry from before and for the better. I am able to have conversations with people and also reply and they do not have to make that extra effort that they needed to. Make things easier for everybody. The one I bought is at the starting range although the hearing aids go all the way to 8 lakhs for a pair (INR 800,000), the more expensive ones having WiFi, Bluetooth and more channels, it all depends on how much can one afford. And AFAIK there is not a single Indian manufacturer who is known in this business.
One thing I did notice is while the hearing aids are remarkably sturdy if they fall down as they are small, yet you have to be careful of both dust and water . That does makes life a bit difficult as my house and city both gets sand quite a bit everyday. I don t think they made any India-specific changes, if they had, would probably make things better. I haven t yet looked at it, but it may be possible to hack it remotely. There may or may not be security issues involved, probably would try once I ve bit more time am bit more comfortable to try and see what I can find out. If I had bought it before, maybe I would have applied for the Debian event happening in Kerala, if nothing else, would have been to document what happened there in detail.
I probably would have to get a new motherboard for my desktop probably in a year or two as quite a few motherboards also have WiFi (WiFi 6 ?) think on the southbridge. I at least would have a look in new year and know more as to what s been happening. For last at least 2-3 years there has been a rumor which has been confirmed time and again that the Tata Group has been in talks with multiple vendors to set chip fabrication and testing business but to date they haven t been able to find one. They do keep on giving press conferences about the same but that s all they do :(. Just shared the latest one above.
The Long War Terry Pratchett, Stephen Braxter
Long Earth Terry Pratchett, Stephen Braxter
ISBN13: 9780062067777
Last month there was also a seconds books sale where I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Long War. But before I share about the book itself, I had a discussion with another of my friends and had to re-share part of that conversation. While the gentleman was adamant that non-fiction books are great, my point as always is both are equal. As I shared perhaps on this blog itself, perhaps multiple times, that I had seen a YT video in which a professor shared multiple textbooks of physics and shared how they are wrong and have been wrong and kept them in a specific corner. He took the latest book which he honestly said doesn t have any mistakes as far as he know and yet still kept in that same corner denoting that it is highly possible that future understanding will make the knowledge or understanding we know different. An example of physics in the nano world and how that is different and basically turns our understanding than what we know.
Now as far as the book is concerned, remember Michael Crichton s Timeline. Now that book was originally written in the 1960 s while this one was written by both the honorable gentleman in 2013. So almost 50+ years difference between the two books, and that even shows how they think about things. In this book, you no longer need a big machine, but have something called a stepper machine which is say similar to a cellphone, that size and that frame, thickness etc. In this one, the idea of multiverse is also there but done a tad differently. In this, we do not have other humans or copy humans but have multiple earths that may have same or different geography as how evolution happened. None of the multiverse earths have humans but have different species depending on the evolution that happened there. There are something called as trolls but they have a much different meaning and way about them about how most fantasy authors portray trolls. While they are big in this as well, they are as gentle as bears or rabbits. So the whole thing is about real estate and how humans have spread out on multiple earths and the politics therein. Interestingly, the story was trashed or given negative reviews on Goodreads. The sad part is/was that it was written and published in 2013 when perhaps the possibility of war or anything like that was very remote especially in the States, but now we are now in 2022 and just had an insurrection happen and whole lot of Americans are radicalized, whether you see the left or the right depending on your ideology. An American did share few weeks ago how some shares are looking at Proportional Representation and that should make both parties come more towards the center and be a bit more transparent. What was interesting to me is the fact that states have much more rights to do elections and electioneering the way they want rather than a set model which everyone has common which is what happens in India. This also does poke holes into the whole Donald Trump stolen democracy drama but that s a different story altogether.
One of the more interesting things I came to know about is that there are 4 books in the long series and this was the second book in itself. I do not want to dwell on the characters themselves as frankly speaking I haven t read all the four books and it would be gross injustice on my part to talk about the characters themselves. Did I enjoy reading the book, for sure. What was interesting and very true of human nature is that even if we have the ability or had the ability to have whole worlds to ourselves, we are bound to mess it up. And in that aspect, I don t think he is too far off the mark. If I had a whole world, wouldn t I try to exploit it to the best or worse of my ability. One of the more interesting topics in the book is the barter system they have thought of that is called as favors. If you are in multiple worlds, then having a currency, even fiat money is of no use and they have to find ways and means to trade with one another. The book also touches a bit on slavery but only just and doesn t really explore it as much as it could have.
Identity
Now this has many meanings to it. Couple of weeks ago, saw a transgender meet. For the uninitiated or rather people like me, basically it is about people who are born in one gender but do not identify with it but the other and they express it first through their clothes and expression and the end of the journey perhaps is with having the organs but this may or may not be feasible, as such surgery is expensive and also not available everywhere. After section 377 was repealed few years ago, we do have a third gender on forms as well as have something called a Transgender Act but how much the needle has moved in society is still a question. They were doing a roadshow near my house hence I was able to talk with them with my new hearing aids and while there was lot of traffic was able to understand some of their issues. For e.g. they find it difficult to get houses on rent, but then it is similar for bachelor guys or girls also. One could argue to what degree it is, and that perhaps maybe. Also, there is a myth that they are somehow promiscuous but that I believe is neither here or there. Osho said an average person thinks about the opposite sex every few seconds or a minute. I am sure even Freud would have similar ideas. So, if you look in that way everybody is promiscuous as far as thought is concerned. The other part being opportunity but that again is function of so many other things. Some people are able to attract a lot of people, others might not. And then whether they chose to act on that opportunity or not is another thing altogether.
Another word that is or was used is called gender fluid, but that too is iffy as gender fluid may or may not mean transgender. Also, while watching some nature documentary few days/weeks back had come to know that trees have something like 18 odd genders. That just blows me out of the mind and does re-question this whole idea of sexuality and identity to only two which seems somewhat regressive at least to me. If we think humans are part of nature, then we need to be open up perhaps a bit more.
But identity as I shared above has more than one meaning. For e.g. citizenship, that one is born in India is even messier to know, understand and define. I had come across this article about couple of months back. Now think about this. Now, there have been studies and surveys about citizenship and it says something like 60% birth registrations are done in metro cities. Now Metro cities are 10 as defined by Indian state.
But there are roughly an odd 4k cities in India and probably twice the number of villages and those are conservative numbers as we still don t record things meticulously, maybe due to the Indian oral tradition or just being lazy or both, one part is also that if you document people and villages and towns, then you are also obligated to give them some things as a state and that perhaps is not what the Indian state wants.
A small village in India could be anywhere from few hundreds of people to a few thousand. And all the new interventions whether it is PAN, Aadhar has just made holes rather than making things better.
They are not inclusive but exclusive. And none of this takes into account Indian character and the way things are done in India. In most households, excluding the celebs (they are in a world of pain altogether when it comes to baby names but then it s big business but that s an entire different saga altogether, so not going to touch that.) I would use or say my individual case as that is and seems to be something which is regular even today. I was given a nickname when I was 3 years old and given a name when I was 5-6 when I was put in school. I also came to know in school few kids who didn t like their names and couple of them cajoled and actually changed their names while they were kids, most of us just stayed with what we got. I do remember sharing about nakushi or something similar a name given to few girls in Maharashtra by their parents and the state intervened and changed their names. But that too is another story in itself. What I find most problematic is that the state seems to be blind, and this seems to be by design rather than a mistake. Couple of years back, Assam did something called NRC (National Register of Citizens) and by the Govt s own account it was a failure of massive proportions. And they still want to bring in CAA, screwing up Assam more. And this is the same Govt. went shown how incorrect it was, blamed it all on the High Court and it s the same Govt. that shopped around for judges to put somebody called Mr. Saibaba (an invalid 90 year adivasi) against whom the Govt. hasn t even a single proof as of date. Apparently, they went to 6 judges who couldn t give what the decision the Govt. wanted. All this info. is in public domain. So the current party ruling, i.e. BJP just wants to make more divisions rather than taking people along as they don t have answers either on economy, inflation or issues that people are facing.
One bright light has been Rahul Gandhi who has been doing a padhyatra (walking) from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and has had tremendous success although mainstream media has showed almost nothing what he is doing or why he is doing that. Not only he had people following him, there are and were many who took his example and using the same values of inclusiveness are walking where they can. And this is not to do with just a political party but more with a political thought of inclusiveness, that we are one irrespective of what I believe, eat, wear etc. And that gentleman has been giving press conferences while our dear P.M. even after 8 years doesn t have the guts to do a single press conference.
Before closing, I do want to take another aspect, Rahul Gandhi s mother is an Italian or was from Italy before she married. But for BJP she is still Italian. Rishi Sunak, who has become the UK Prime Minister they think of him as Indian and yet he has sworn using the Queen s name. And the same goes for Canada Kumar (Akshay Kumar) and many others. How the right is able to blind and deaf to what it thinks is beyond me. All these people have taken an oath in the name of the Queen and they have to be loyal to her or rather now King Charles III. The disconnect continues.
Carpe Jugulum is the 23rd Discworld novel and the 6th witches
novel. I would not recommend reading it before Maskerade, which introduces Agnes.
There are some spoilers for Wyrd
Sisters, Lords and Ladies, and
Maskerade in the setup here and hence in the plot description
below. I don't think they matter that much, but if you're avoiding all
spoilers for earlier books, you may want to skip over this one. (You're
unlikely to want to read it before those books anyway.)
It is time to name the child of the king of Lancre, and in a gesture of
good will and modernization, he has invited his neighbors in Uberwald to
attend. Given that those neighbors are vampires, an open invitation was
perhaps not the wisest choice.
Meanwhile, Granny Weatherwax's invitation has gone missing. On the plus
side, that meant she was home to be summoned to the bedside of a pregnant
woman who was kicked by a cow, where she makes the type of hard decision
that Granny has been making throughout the series. On the minus side, the
apparent snub seems to send her into a spiral of anger at the lack of
appreciation.
Points off right from the start for a plot based on a misunderstanding and
a subsequent refusal of people to simply talk to each other. It is partly
engineered, but still, it's a cheap and irritating plot.
This is an odd book.
The vampires (or vampyres, as the Count wants to use) think of themselves
as modern and sophisticated, making a break from the past by attempting to
overcome such traditional problems as burning up in the sunlight and fear
of religious symbols and garlic. The Count has put his family through
rigorous training and desensitization, deciding such traditional
vulnerabilities are outdated things of the past. He has, however, kept
the belief that vampires are at the top of a natural chain of being,
humans are essentially cattle, and vampires naturally should rule and feed
on the population. Lancre is an attractive new food source. Vampires
also have mind control powers, control the weather, and can put their
minds into magpies.
They are, in short, enemies designed for Granny Weatherwax, the witch
expert in headology. A shame that Granny is apparently off sulking.
Nanny and Agnes may have to handle the vampires on their own, with the
help of Magrat.
One of the things that makes this book odd is that it seemed like
Pratchett was setting up some character growth, giving Agnes a chance to
shine, and giving Nanny Ogg a challenge that she didn't want. This sort
of happens, but then nothing much comes of it. Most of the book is the
vampires preening about how powerful they are and easily conquering
Lancre, while everyone else flails ineffectively. Pratchett does pull
together an ending with some nice set pieces, but that ending doesn't
deliver on any of the changes or developments it felt like the story was
setting up.
We do get a lot of Granny, along with an amusingly earnest priest of Om
(lots of references to Small Gods here,
while firmly establishing it as long-ago history). Granny is one of my
favorite Discworld characters, so I don't mind that, but we've seen Granny
solve a lot of problems before. I wanted to see more of Agnes, who is the
interesting new character and whose dynamic with her inner voice feels
like it has a great deal of unrealized potential.
There is a sharp and condensed version of comparative religion from
Granny, which is probably the strongest part of the book and includes one
of those Discworld quotes that has been widely repeated out of context:
"And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including
yourself. That's what sin is."
"It's a lot more complicated than that "
"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated
than that, they means they're getting worried that they won t like the
truth. People as things, that's where it starts."
This loses a bit in context because this book is literally about treating
people as things, and thus the observation feels more obvious when it
arrives in this book than when you encounter it on its own, but it's still
a great quote.
Sadly, I found a lot of this book annoying. One of those annoyances is a
pet peeve that others may or may not share: I have very little patience
for dialogue in phonetically-spelled dialect, and there are two
substantial cases of that here. One is a servant named Igor who speaks
with an affected lisp represented by replacing every ess sound with th,
resulting in lots of this:
"No, my Uncle Igor thtill workth for him. Been thtruck by lightning
three hundred timeth and thtill putth in a full night'th work."
I like Igor as a character (he's essentially a refugee from The
Addams Family, which adds a good counterpoint to the malicious and
arrogant evil of the vampires), but my brain stumbles over words like
"thtill" every time. It's not that I can't decipher it; it's that the
deciphering breaks the flow of reading in a way that I found not at all
fun. It bugged me enough that I started skipping his lines if I couldn't
work them out right away.
The other example is the Nac Mac Feegles, who are... well, in the book,
they're Pictsies and a type of fairy, but they're Scottish Smurfs, right
down to only having one female (at least in this book). They're
entertainingly homicidal, but they all talk like this:
"Ach, hins tak yar scaggie, yer dank yowl callyake!"
I'm from the US and bad with accents and even worse with accents
reproduced in weird spellings, and I'm afraid that I found 95% of
everything said by Nac Mac Feegles completely incomprehensible to the
point where I gave up even trying to read it. (I'm now rather worried
about the Tiffany Aching books and am hoping Pratchett toned the dialect
down a lot, because I'm not sure I can deal with more of this.)
But even apart from the dialect, I thought something was off about the
plot structure of this book. There's a lot of focus on characters who
don't seem to contribute much to the plot resolution. I wanted more of
the varied strengths of Lancre coming together, rather than the focus on
Granny. And the vampires are absurdly powerful, unflappable, smarmy, and
contemptuous of everyone, which makes for threatening villains but also
means spending a lot of narrative time with a Discworld version of
Jacob Rees-Mogg. I
feel like there's enough of that in the news already.
Also, while I will avoid saying too much about the plot, I get very
suspicious when older forms of oppression are presented as good
alternatives to modernizing, rationalist spins on exploitation. I see
what Pratchett was trying to do, and there is an interesting point here
about everyone having personal relationships and knowing their roles (a
long-standing theme of the Lancre Discworld stories). But I think the
reason why there is some nostalgia for older autocracy is that we only
hear about it from stories, and the process of storytelling often creates
emotional distance and a patina of adventure and happy outcomes. Maybe
you can make an argument that classic British imperialism is superior to
smug neoliberalism, but both of them are quite bad and I don't want either
of them.
On a similar note, Nanny Ogg's tyranny over her entire extended clan
continues to be played for laughs, but it's rather unappealing and seems
more abusive the more one thinks about it. I realize the witches are not
intended to be wholly good or uncomplicated moral figures, but I want to
like Nanny, and Pratchett seems to be writing her as likable, even though
she has an astonishing lack of respect for all the people she's related
to. One might even say that she treats them like things.
There are some great bits in this book, and I suspect there are many
people who liked it more than I did. I wouldn't be surprised if it was
someone's favorite Discworld novel. But there were enough bits that
didn't work for me that I thought it averaged out to a middle-of-the-road
entry.
Followed by The Fifth Elephant in publication order. This is the
last regular witches novel, but some of the thematic thread is picked up
by The Wee Free Men, the first Tiffany Aching novel.
Rating: 7 out of 10
This is the 22nd Discworld novel and follows Interesting Times in internal continuity. Like some of the other
Rincewind novels, it stands alone well enough that you could arguably
start reading here, but I have no idea why you'd want to.
When we last saw Rincewind, he was being magically yanked out of the
Agatean Empire. The intent was to swap him with a cannon and land him
back in Ankh-Morpork, but an unfortunate expansion of the spell to three
targets instead of two meant that a kangaroo had a very bad day. Ever
since then, Rincewind has been trying to survive the highly inhospitable
land of FourEcks (XXXX), so called because no one in Ankh-Morpork knows
where it is.
The faculty at the Unseen University didn't care enough about Rincewind to
bother finding him until the Librarian fell sick. He's feverish and
miserable, but worse, he's lost control of his morphic function, which
means that he's randomly turning into other things and is unable to take
care of the books. When those books are magical, this is dangerous. One
possible solution is to stabilize the Librarian's form with a spell, but
to do that they need his real name. The only person who might know it is
the former assistant librarian: Rincewind.
I am increasingly convinced that one of the difficulties in getting people
hooked on Discworld is that the series starts with two Rincewind books,
and the Rincewind books just aren't very good.
The fundamental problem is that Rincewind isn't a character, he's a gag.
Discworld starts out as mostly gags, but then the characterization
elsewhere gets deeper, the character interactions become more complex, and
Pratchett adds more and more philosophy. That, not the humor, is what I
think makes these books worth reading. But none of this applies to
Rincewind. By this point, he's been the protagonist of six novels, and
still the only thing I know about him is that he runs away from
everything. Other than that, he's just sort of... there.
In the better Rincewind novels, some of the gap is filled by Twoflower,
the Luggage, Cohen the barbarian, the Librarian (who sadly is out of
commission for most of this book), or the Unseen University faculty. But
they're all supporting characters. Most of them are also built around a
single (if better) gag. As a result, the Rincewind books tend more
towards joke collections than the rest of Discworld. There isn't a
philosophical or characterization through line to hold them together.
The Last Continent is, as you might have guessed, a parody of
Australia. And by that I mean it's a mash-up of Crocodile Dundee,
Mad Max, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,
and every dad joke about Australia that you've heard. Pratchett loves
movie references and I do not love movie references, so there's always
part of his books that doesn't click for me, but this one was just Too
Much. Yes, everything in Australia is poisonous. Yes, Australians talk
funny. Oh look, there's another twist on a Crocodile Dundee quote.
Yes, yes, that's a knife. Gah. The Rincewind sections were either
confusing (there's some sort of drug-trip kangaroo god because reasons) or
cliched and boring. Sometimes both.
The second plot, following the Unseen University faculty in their inept
attempts to locate Rincewind, is better. Their bickering is still a bit
one-trick and works better in the background of stronger characters (such
as Death and Susan), but Pratchett does make
their oblivious overconfidence entertaining. It's enough to sustain half
of the book, but not enough to make up for the annoyances of the Rincewind
plot.
To his credit, I think Pratchett was really trying to say something
interesting in this novel about Discworld metaphysics. There are bits in
the Australian plot that clearly are references to Aboriginal beliefs,
which I didn't entirely follow but which I'm glad were in there. The
Unseen University faculty showing up in the middle of a creation myth and
completely misunderstanding it was a good scene. But the overall story
annoyed me and failed to hold my interest.
I don't feel qualified to comment on the Priscilla scenes, since
I've never seen the movie and have only a vague understanding of its role
in trans history. I'm not sure his twists on the story quite worked, but
I'm glad that Pratchett is exploring gender; that wasn't as common when
these books were written.
Overall, though, this was forgettable and often annoying. There are a few
great lines and a few memorable bits in any Pratchett book, including this
one, but the Rincewind books just aren't... good. Not like the rest of
the series, at least. I will be very happy to get back to the witches in
the next book.
Followed in publication order by Carpe Jugulum, and later
thematically by The Last Hero.
Rating: 5 out of 10
This is the 21st Discworld novel and relies on the previous Watch novels
for characterization and cast development. I would not start here.
In the middle of the Circle Sea, the body of water between Ankh-Morpork
and the desert empire of Klatch, a territorial squabble between one
fishing family from Ankh-Morpork and one from Klatch is interrupted by a
weathercock rising dramatically from the sea. When the weathercock is
shortly followed by the city to which it is attached and the island on
which that city is resting, it's justification for more than a fishing
squabble. It's a good reason for a war over new territory.
The start of hostilities is an assassination attempt on a prince of
Klatch. Vimes and the Watch start investigating, but politics outraces
police work. Wars are a matter for the nobility and their armies, not for
normal civilian leadership. Lord Vetinari resigns, leaving the city under
the command of Lord Rust, who is eager for a glorious military victory
against their long-term rivals. The Klatchians seem equally eager to
oblige.
One of the useful properties of a long series is that you build up a cast
of characters you can throw at a plot, and if you can assume the reader
has read enough of the previous books, you don't have to spend a lot of
time on establishing characterization and can get straight to the story.
Pratchett uses that here. You could read this cold, I suppose, because
most of the Watch are obvious enough types that the bits of
characterization they get are enough, but it works best with the nuance
and layers of the previous books. Of course Colon is the most susceptible
to the jingoism that prompts the book's title, and of course Angua's
abilities make her the best detective. The familiar characters let
Pratchett dive right in to the political machinations.
Everyone plays to type here: Vetinari is deftly maneuvering everyone into
place to make the situation work out the way he wants, Vimes is stubborn
and ethical and needs Vetinari to push him in the right direction, and
Carrot is sensible and effortlessly charismatic. Colon and Nobby are, as
usual, comic relief of a sort, spending much of the book with Vetinari
while not understanding what he's up to. But Nobby gets an interesting
bit of characterization in the form of an extended turn as a spy that
starts as cross-dressing and becomes an understated sort of gender
exploration hidden behind humor that's less mocking than one might expect.
Pratchett has been slowly playing more with gender in this series, and
while it's simple and a bit deemphasized, I like it.
I think the best part of this book, thematically, is the contrast between
Carrot's and Vimes's reactions to the war. Carrot is a paragon of a
certain type of ethics in Watch novels, but a war is one of the things
that plays to his weaknesses. Carrot follows rules, and wars have rules
of a type. You can potentially draw Carrot into them. But Vimes, despite
being someone who enforces rules professionally, is deeply suspicious of
them, which makes him harder to fool. Pratchett uses one of the Klatchian
characters to hold a mirror up to Vimes in ways that are minor spoilers,
but that I quite liked.
The argument of jingoism, made by both Lord Rust and by the Klatchian
prince, is that wars are something special, outside the normal rules of
justice. Vimes absolutely refuses this position. As someone from the US,
his reaction to Lord Rust's attempted militarization of the Watch was one
of the best moments of the book.
Not a muscle moved on Rust's face. There was a clink as
Vimes's badge was set neatly on the table.
"I don't have to take this," Vimes said calmly.
"Oh, so you'd rather be a civilian, would you?"
"A watchman is a civilian, you inbred streak of pus!"
Vimes is also willing to think of a war as a possible crime, which may not
be as effective as Vetinari's tricky scheming but which is very
emotionally satisfying.
As with most Pratchett books, the moral underpinnings of the story aren't
that elaborate: people are people despite cultural differences, wars are
bad, and people are too ready to believe the worst of their neighbors.
The story arc is not going to provide great insights into human character
that the reader did not already have. But watching Vimes stubbornly
attempt to do the right thing regardless of the rule book is wholly
satisfying, and watching Vetinari at work is equally, if differently,
enjoyable.
Not the best Discworld novel, but one of the better ones.
Followed by The Last Continent in publication order, and by
The Fifth Elephant thematically.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Hogfather is the 20th Discworld novel and not a very good place to
start. I recommend at least reading Soul
Music first for a proper introduction to Susan, and you may want to
start with Mort.
When we last saw Susan, she was a student at the Quirm College for Young
Ladies. Now she's a governess for two adorable youngsters, a job that
includes telling them stories and dealing quite capably with monsters in
the cellar. (She uses a poker.) It also includes answering questions
like whether the Hogfather really exists or whether the presents just come
from your parents.
"Look at it this way, then," she said, and took a deep mental breath.
"Wherever people are obtuse and absurd... and wherever they have, by
even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small
chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged
cockroach... and wherever people are inanely credulous, pathetically
attached to the certainties of the nursery and, in general, have as
much grasp of the physical universe as an oyster has of
mountaineering... yes, Twyla: there is a Hogfather.
Meanwhile, the Auditors, last seen meddling with Death in
Reaper Man, approach the Assassin's
Guild in Ankh-Morpork to hire the assassination of the Hogfather. This
rather unusual assignment falls to Mister Teatime, an orphan who was taken
in by the guild at an early age and trained to be an assassin. Teatime is
a little unnerving, mostly because he enjoys being an assassin. Rather a
lot.
Hogfather has two major things to recommend it: it's a Death novel,
and it features Susan, who is one of my favorite Discworld characters. It
also has two major strikes against it, at least for me.
The first is relatively minor but, for me, the most irritating. A bit of
the way into the story, Pratchett introduces the Oh God of Hangovers
fair, that's a good pun and then decides that's a good excuse for nausea
and vomiting jokes. A lot of nausea and vomiting jokes.
Look. I know a lot of people don't mind this. But I beg authors (and,
even more so, filmmakers and cartoonists) to consider whether a joke that
some of your audience might like is worth making other parts of your
audience feel physically ill while trying to enjoy your work. It's not at
all a pleasant experience, and while I handle it better in written form,
it still knocks me out of the story and makes me want to skip over scenes
with the obnoxious character who won't shut up about it. Thankfully this
does stop by the end of the book, but there are several segments in the
middle that were rather unpleasant.
The second is that Pratchett tries to convince the reader of the mythical
importance of the Santa Claus myth (for which Hogfather is an obvious
stand-in, if with a Discworld twist), an effort for which I am a highly
unsympathetic audience. I'm with Susan above, with an extra helping of
deep dislike for telling children who trust you something that's literally
untrue. Pratchett does try: he has Death makes a memorable and
frequently-quoted point near the end of the book (transcribed below) that
I don't entirely agree with but still respect. But still, the book is
very invested in convincing Susan that people believing mythology is
critically important to humanity, and I have so many problems with the
literalness of "believing" and the use of trusting children for this
purpose by adults who know better.
There are few topics that bring out my grumpiness more than Santa Claus.
Grumbling aside, though, I did enjoy this book anyway. Susan is always a
delight, and I could read about her adventures as a governess for as long
as Pratchett wanted to write them. Death is filling in for the Hogfather
for most of the book, which is hilarious because he's far too good at it,
in his painfully earnest and literal way, to be entirely safe. I was less
fond of Albert's supporting role (who I am increasingly coming to dislike
as a character), but the entire scene of Death as a mall Santa is
brilliant. And Teatime is an effective, creepy villain, something that
the Discworld series doesn't always deliver. The powers arrayed on
Discworld are so strong that it can be hard to design a villain who
effectively challenges them, but Teatime has a sociopathic Professor
Moriarty energy with added creepiness that fills that role in this book
satisfyingly.
As is typical for Pratchett (at least for me), the plot was serviceable but
not the highlight. Pratchett plays in some interesting ways with a
child's view of the world, the Unseen University bumbles around as a side
plot, and it comes together at the end in a way that makes sense, but the
journey is the fun of the story. The conclusion felt a bit gratuitous,
there mostly to wrap up the story than something that followed naturally
from the previous plot. But it does feature one of the most quoted bits
in Discworld:
"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans
need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED
FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS
THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little "
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE
LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST
POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM
OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET Death waved a hand. AND
YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE
IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the
point "
MY POINT EXACTLY.
Here's the thing, though: Susan is right. They're not the same
sort of thing at all, and Pratchett doesn't present an argument that they
are. Death's response is great, but it's also a non sequitur: it is true
and correct but has nothing to do with Susan's argument. Justice is not a
lie in the sense that Santa Claus is a lie: justice is something that
humans can create, just like humans can create gift-giving or a tradition
of imaginative story-telling. But this is not at all the same thing as
encouraging children to believe in the literal existence of a fat man in
red who comes down chimneys to deliver gifts by magic.
And Death isn't even correct in Discworld! If one pays careful
attention to the story, the consequences he's thinks would follow from the
Auditors' attempt on the Hogfather not only don't happen, the exact
opposite happens. This is the point of the Unseen University
subplot, and it's also what happened in Reaper Man. The Auditors
may be trying to kill mythology, but what the books show is that the real
danger comes from the backlash. The force they're meddling with is far
more powerful and persistent than they are.
Death appears to be, by the stated events of the story, completely
incorrect in his analysis of Discworld's metaphysics. Maybe Pratchett
knows this? He did write a story that contradicts Death's analysis if one
reads it carefully. But if so, this is not obvious from the text, or from
Susan's reaction to Death's speech, which makes the metaphysics weirdly
unsatisfying.
So, overall, a mixed bag. Most of the book is very fun, but the
metaphysics heavily rest on a pet peeve of mine, and I really could
have done without the loving descriptions of the effects of hangovers.
This is one of the more famous Discworld novels for the above quote, and
on its own this is deserved (it's a great quote), but I think the logic is
muddled and the story itself contradicts the implications. A rather odd
reading experience.
Followed by Jingo in publication order, and Thief of Time
thematically.
Rating: 7 out of 10
It's been a while since I posted one of these! Or, really, much of
anything else. Busy and distracted this summer and a bit behind on a wide
variety of things at the moment, although thankfully not in a bad way.
Sara Alfageeh & Nadia Shammas Squire (graphic novel)
Travis Baldree Legends & Lattes (sff)
Leigh Bardugo Six of Crows (sff)
Miles Cameron Artifact Space (sff)
Robert Caro The Power Broker (nonfiction)
Kate Elliott Servant Mage (sff)
Nicola Griffith Spear (sff)
Alix E. Harrow A Mirror Mended (sff)
Tony Judt Postwar (nonfiction)
T. Kingfisher Nettle & Bone (sff)
Matthys Levy & Mario Salvadori Why Buildings Fall Down
(nonfiction)
Lev Menand The Fed Unbound (nonfiction)
Courtney Milan Trade Me (romance)
Elie Mystal Allow Me to Retort (nonfiction)
Quenby Olson Miss Percy's Pocket Guide (sff)
Anu Partanen The Nordic Theory of Everything (nonfiction)
Terry Pratchett Hogfather (sff)
Terry Pratchett Jingo (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Last Continent (sff)
Terry Pratchett Carpe Jugulum (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Fifth Elephant (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Truth (sff)
Victor Ray On Critical Race Theory (nonfiction)
Richard Roberts A Spaceship Repair Girl Supposedly Named Rachel
(sff)
Nisi Shawl & Latoya Peterson (ed.) Black Stars (sff anthology)
John Scalzi The Kaiju Preservation Society (sff)
James C. Scott Seeing Like a State (nonfiction)
Mary Sisson Trang (sff)
Mary Sisson Trust (sff)
Benjanun Sriduangkaew And Shall Machines Surrender (sff)
Lea Ypi Free (nonfiction)
It's been long enough that I've already read and reviewed some of these.
Already read and pending review are the next two Pratchett novels in my
slow progress working through them. Had to catch up with the Tor.com
re-read series.
So many books and quite definitely not enough time at the moment, although
I've been doing better at reading this summer than last summer!
Feet of Clay is the 19th Discworld novel, the third Watch novel,
and probably not the best place to start. You could read only
Guards! Guards! and
Men at Arms before this one, though, if
you wanted.
This story opens with a golem selling another golem to a factory owner,
obviously not caring about the price. This is followed by two murders:
an elderly priest, and the curator of a dwarven bread museum. (Dwarf
bread is a much-feared weapon of war.) Meanwhile, assassins are still
trying to kill Watch Commander Vimes, who has an appointment to get a coat
of arms. A dwarf named Cheery Littlebottom is joining the Watch. And
Lord Vetinari, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork, has been poisoned.
There's a lot going on in this book, and while it's all in some sense
related, it's more interwoven than part of a single story. The result
felt to me like a day-in-the-life episode of a cop show: a lot of
character development, a few largely separate plot lines so that the
characters have something to do, and the development of a few long-running
themes that are neither started nor concluded in this book. We check in
on all the individual Watch members we've met to date, add new ones, and
at the end of the book everyone is roughly back to where they were when
the book started.
This is, to be clear, not a bad thing for a book to do. It relies on the
reader already caring about the characters and being invested in the long
arc of the series, but both of those are true of me, so it worked. Cheery
is a good addition, giving Pratchett an opportunity to explore gender
nonconformity with a twist (all dwarfs are expected to act the same way
regardless of gender, which doesn't work for Cheery) and, even better,
giving Angua more scenes. Angua is among my favorite Watch characters,
although I wish she'd gotten more of a resolution for her relationship
anxiety in this book.
The primary plot is about golems, which on Discworld are used in factories
because they work nonstop, have no other needs, and do whatever they're
told. Nearly everyone in Ankh-Morpork considers them machinery. If
you've read any Discworld books before, you will find it unsurprising that
Pratchett calls that belief into question, but the ways he gets there, and
the links between the golem plot and the other plot threads, have a few
good twists and turns.
Reading this, I was reminded vividly of
Orwell's discussion of Charles Dickens:
It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always
pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It
is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more
to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral
plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about
Strong's school being as different from Creakle's "as good is from
evil." Two things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different.
Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless to change institutions
without a "change of heart" that, essentially, is what he is always
saying.
If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a
reactionary humbug. A "change of heart" is in fact the alibi of
people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But Dickens is not
a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression
one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny.
and later:
His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that
it is there. That is the difference between being a moralist and a
politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear
grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional
perception that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, "Behave
decently," which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so
shallow as it sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories,
because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the
shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is,
they see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental
coarseness. The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its
permanence. What he is out against is not this or that institution,
but, as Chesterton put it, "an expression on the human face."
I think Pratchett is, in that sense, a Dickensian writer, and it shows all
through Discworld. He does write political crises (there is one in this
book), but the crises are moral or personal, not ideological or
structural. The Watch novels are often concerned with systems of
government, but focus primarily on the popular appeal of kings, the skill
of the Patrician, and the greed of those who would maneuver for power.
Pratchett does not write (at least so far) about the proper role of
government, the impact of Vetinari's policies (or even what those policies
may be), or political theory in any deep sense. What he does write about,
at great length, is morality, fairness, and a deeply generous humanism,
all of which are central to the golem plot.
Vimes is a great protagonist for this type of story. He's grumpy,
cynical, stubborn, and prejudiced, and we learn in this book that he's a
descendant of the Discworld version of Oliver Cromwell. He can be
reflexively self-centered, and he has no clear idea how to use his
newfound resources. But he behaves decently towards people, in both big
and small things, for reasons that the reader feels he could never
adequately explain, but which are rooted in empathy and an instinctual
sense of fairness. It's fun to watch him grumble his way through the plot
while making snide comments about mysteries and detectives.
I do have to complain a bit about one of those mysteries, though. I would
have enjoyed the plot around Vetinari's poisoning more if Pratchett hadn't
mercilessly teased readers who know a bit about French history. An
allusion or two would have been fun, but he kept dropping references while
having Vimes ignore them, and I found the overall effect both frustrating
and irritating. That and a few other bits, like Angua's uncommunicative
angst, fell flat for me. Thankfully, several other excellent scenes made
up for them, such as Nobby's high society party and everything about the
College of Heralds. Also, Vimes's impish PDA (smartphone without the
phone, for those younger than I am) remains absurdly good commentary on
the annoyances of portable digital devices despite an original publication
date of 1996.
Feet of Clay is less focused than the previous Watch novels and
more of a series book than most Discworld novels. You're reading about
characters introduced in previous books with problems that will continue
into subsequent books. The plot and the mysteries are there to drive the
story but seem relatively incidental to the characterization. This isn't
a complaint; at this point in the series, I'm in it for the long haul, and
I liked the variation. As usual, Pratchett is stronger for me when he's
not overly focused on parody. His own characters are as good as the
material he's been parodying, and I'm happy to see them get a book that's
not overshadowed by another material.
If you've read this far in the series, or even in just the Watch novels,
recommended.
Followed by Hogfather in publication order and, thematically, by
Jingo.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Maskerade is the 18th book of the Discworld series, but you
probably could start here. You'd miss the introduction of Granny
Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, which might be a bit confusing, but I suspect
you could pick it up as you went if you wanted. This is a sequel of sorts
to Lords and Ladies, but not in a very
immediate sense.
Granny is getting distracted and less interested in day-to-day witching in
Lancre. This is not good; Granny is incredibly powerful, and bored and
distracted witches can go to dark places. Nanny is concerned. Granny
needs something to do, and their coven needs a third. It's not been the
same since they lost their maiden member.
Nanny's solution to this problem is two-pronged. First, they'd had their
eye on a local girl named Agnes, who had magic but who wasn't interested
in being a witch. Perhaps it was time to recruit her anyway, even though
she'd left Lancre for Ankh-Morpork. And second, Granny needs something to
light a fire under her, something that will get her outraged and ready to
engage with the world. Something like a cookbook of aphrodisiac recipes
attributed to the Witch of Lancre.
Agnes, meanwhile, is auditioning for the opera. She's a sensible person,
cursed her whole life by having a wonderful personality, but a part of her
deep inside wants to be called Perdita X. Dream and have a dramatic life.
Having a wonderful personality can be very frustrating, but no one in
Lancre took either that desire or her name seriously. Perhaps the opera
is somewhere where she can find the life she's looking for, along with
another opportunity to try on the Perdita name. One thing she can do is
sing; that's where all of her magic went.
The Ankh-Morpork opera is indeed dramatic. It's also losing an astounding
amount of money for its new owner, who foolishly thought owning an opera
would be a good retirement project after running a cheese business. And
it's haunted by a ghost, a very tangible ghost who has started killing
people.
I think this is my favorite Discworld novel to date (although with a
caveat about the ending that I'll get to in a moment). It's certainly the
one that had me laughing out loud the most. Agnes (including her Perdita
personality aspect) shot to the top of my list of favorite Discworld
characters, in part because I found her sensible personality so utterly
relatable. She is fascinated by drama, she wants to be in the middle of
it and let her inner Perdita goth character revel in it, and yet she
cannot help being practical and unflappable even when surrounded by people
who use far too many exclamation points. It's one thing to want drama in
the abstract; it's quite another to be heedlessly dramatic in the moment,
when there's an obviously reasonable thing to do instead. Pratchett
writes this wonderfully.
The other half of the story follows Granny and Nanny, who are unstoppable
forces of nature and a wonderful team. They have the sort of
long-standing, unshakable adult friendship between very unlike people
that's full of banter and minor irritations layered on top of a deep
mutual understanding and respect. Once they decide to start investigating
this supposed opera ghost, they divvy up the investigative work with
hardly a word exchanged. Planning isn't necessary; they both know each
other's strengths.
We've gotten a lot of Granny's skills in previous books. Maskerade
gives Nanny a chance to show off her skills, and it's a delight. She
effortlessly becomes the sort of friendly grandmother who blends in so
well that no one questions why she's there, and thus manages to be in the
middle of every important event. Granny watches and thinks and theorizes;
Nanny simply gets into the middle of everything and talks to everyone
until people tell her what she wants to know. There's no real doubt that
the two of them are going to get to the bottom of anything they want to
get to the bottom of, but watching how they get there is a delight.
I love how Pratchett handles that sort of magical power from a
world-building perspective. Ankh-Morpork is the Big City, the center of
political power in most of the Discworld books, and Granny and Nanny are
from the boondocks. By convention, that means they should either be awed
or confused by the city, or gain power in the city by transforming it in
some way to match their area of power. This isn't how Pratchett writes
witches at all. Their magic is in understanding people, and the people in
Ankh-Morpork are just as much people as the people in Lancre. The
differences of the city may warrant an occasional grumpy aside, but the
witches are fully as capable of navigating the city as they are their home
town.
Maskerade is, of course, a parody of opera and musicals, with
Phantom of the Opera playing the central role in much the same
way that Macbeth did in Wyrd
Sisters. Agnes ends up doing the singing for a beautiful, thin actress
named Christine, who can't sing at all despite being an opera star, uses a
truly astonishing excess of exclamation points, and strategically faints
at the first sign of danger. (And, despite all of this, is still likable
in that way that it's impossible to be really upset at a puppy.) She
is the special chosen focus of the ghost, whose murderous taunting is a
direct parody of the Phantom. That was a sufficiently obvious reference
that even I picked up on it, despite being familiar with Phantom of
the Opera only via the soundtrack.
Apart from that, though, the references were lost on me, since I'm neither
a musical nor an opera fan. That didn't hurt my enjoyment of the book in
the slightest; in fact, I suspect it's part of why it's in my top tier of
Discworld books. One of my complaints about Discworld to date is that
Pratchett often overdoes the parody to the extent that it gets in the way
of his own (excellent) characters and story. Maybe it's better to read
Discworld novels where one doesn't recognize the material being parodied
and thus doesn't keep getting distracted by references.
It's probably worth mentioning that Agnes is a large woman and there are
several jokes about her weight in Maskerade. I think they're the
good sort of jokes, about how absurd human bodies can be, not the mean
sort? Pratchett never implies her weight is any sort of moral failing or
something she should change; quite the contrary, Nanny considers it a sign
of solid Lancre genes. But there is some fat discrimination in the opera
itself, since one of the things Pratchett is commenting on is the switch
from full-bodied female opera singers to thin actresses matching an
idealized beauty standard. Christine is the latter, but she can't sing,
and the solution is for Agnes to sing for her from behind, something that
was also done in real opera. I'm not a good judge of how well this plot
line was handled; be aware, going in, if this may bother you.
What did bother me was the ending, and more generally the degree to which
Granny and Nanny felt comfortable making decisions about Agnes's life
without consulting her or appearing to care what she thought of their
conclusions. Pratchett seemed to be on their side, emphasizing how well
they know people. But Agnes left Lancre and avoided the witches for a
reason, and that reason is not honored in much the same way that Lancre
refused to honor her desire to go by Perdita. This doesn't seem to be
malicious, and Agnes herself is a little uncertain about her choice of
identity, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like Agnes got
steamrolled by both the other characters and by Pratchett, and it's the
one thing about this book that I didn't like. Hopefully future Discworld
books about these characters revisit Agnes's agency.
Overall, though, this was great, and a huge improvement over
Interesting Times. I'm excited for the
next witches book.
Followed in publication order by Feet of Clay, and later by
Carpe Jugulum in the thematic sense.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Interesting Times is the seventeenth Discworld novel and certainly
not the place to start. At the least, you will probably want to read
The Colour of Magic and
The Light Fantastic before this book,
since it's a sequel to those (although Rincewind has had some intervening
adventures).
Lord Vetinari has received a message from the Counterweight Continent, the
first in ten years, cryptically demanding the Great Wizzard be sent
immediately.
The Agatean Empire is one of the most powerful states on the Disc.
Thankfully for everyone else, it normally suits its rulers to believe that
the lands outside their walls are inhabited only by ghosts. No one is
inclined to try to change their minds or otherwise draw their attention.
Accordingly, the Great Wizard must be sent, a task that Vetinari
efficiently delegates to the Archchancellor. There is only the small
matter of determining who the Great Wizzard is, and why it was spelled
with two z's.
Discworld readers with a better memory than I will recall Rincewind's hat.
Why the Counterweight Continent would demanding a wizard notorious for his
near-total inability to perform magic is a puzzle for other people.
Rincewind is promptly located by a magical computer, and nearly as
promptly transported across the Disc, swapping him for an unnecessarily
exciting object of roughly equivalent mass and hurling him into an
unexpected rescue of Cohen the Barbarian. Rincewind predictably reacts by
running away, although not fast or far enough to keep him from being
entangled in a glorious popular uprising. Or, well, something that has
aspirations of being glorious, and popular, and an uprising.
I hate to say this, because Pratchett is an ethically thoughtful writer to
whom I am willing to give the benefit of many doubts, but this book was
kind of racist.
The Agatean Empire is modeled after China, and the Rincewind books tend to
be the broadest and most obvious parodies, so that was already a recipe
for some trouble. Some of the social parody is not too objectionable,
albeit not my thing. I find ethnic stereotypes and making fun of
funny-sounding names in other languages (like a city named Hunghung) to be
in poor taste, but Pratchett makes fun of everyone's names and cultures
rather equally. (Also, I admit that some of the water buffalo jokes,
despite the stereotypes, were pretty good.) If it had stopped there, it
would have prompted some eye-rolling but not much comment.
Unfortunately, a significant portion of the plot depends on the idea that
the population of the Agatean Empire has been so brainwashed into
obedience that they have a hard time even imagining resistance, and even
their revolutionaries are so polite that the best they can manage for
slogans are things like "Timely Demise to All Enemies!" What they need
are a bunch of outsiders, such as Rincewind or Cohen and his gang. More
details would be spoilers, but there are several deliberate uses of
Ankh-Morpork as a revolutionary inspiration and a great deal of narrative
hand-wringing over how awful it is to so completely convince people they
are slaves that you don't need chains.
There is a depressingly tedious tendency of western writers, even
otherwise thoughtful and well-meaning ones like Pratchett, to adopt a
simplistic ranking of political systems on a crude measure of freedom.
That analysis immediately encounters the problem that lots of people who
live within systems that rate poorly on this one-dimensional scale seem
inadequately upset about circumstances that are "obviously" horrific
oppression. This should raise questions about the validity of the
assumptions, but those assumptions are so unquestionable that the writer
instead decides the people who are insufficiently upset about their lack
of freedom must be defective. The more racist writers attribute that
defectiveness to racial characteristics. The less racist writers, like
Pratchett, attribute that defectiveness to brainwashing and systemic evil,
which is not quite as bad as overt racism but still rests on a foundation
of smug cultural superiority.
Krister Stendahl, a bishop of the Church of Sweden, coined three famous
rules for understanding other religions:
When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the
adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
Don't compare your best to their worst.
Leave room for "holy envy."
This is excellent advice that should also be applied to politics. Most
systems exist for some reason. The differences from your preferred system
are easy to see, particularly those that strike you as horrible. But
often there are countervailing advantages that are less obvious, and those
are more psychologically difficult to understand and objectively analyze.
You might find they have something that you wish your system had, which
causes discomfort if you're convinced you have the best political system
in the world, or are making yourself feel better about the abuses of your
local politics by assuring yourself that at least you're better than those
people.
I was particularly irritated to see this sort of simplistic stereotyping
in Discworld given that Ankh-Morpork, the setting of most of the Discworld
novels, is an authoritarian dictatorship. Vetinari quite capably
maintains his hold on power, and yet this is not taken as a sign that the
city's inhabitants have been brainwashed into considering themselves
slaves. Instead, he's shown as adept at maintaining the stability of a
precarious system with a lot of competing forces and a high potential for
destructive chaos. Vetinari is an awful person, but he may be better than
anyone who would replace him. Hmm.
This sort of complexity is permitted in the "local" city, but as soon as
we end up in an analog of China, the rulers are evil, the system lacks any
justification, and the peasants only don't revolt because they've been
trained to believe they can't. Gah.
I was muttering about this all the way through Interesting Times,
which is a shame because, outside of the ham-handed political plot, it has
some great Pratchett moments. Rincewind's approach to any and all danger
is a running (sorry) gag that keeps working, and Cohen and his gang of
absurdly competent decrepit barbarians are both funnier here than they
have been in any previous book and the rare highly-positive portrayal of
old people in fantasy adventures who are not wizards or crones. Pretty
Butterfly is a great character who deserved to be in a better plot. And I
loved the trouble that Rincewind had with the Agatean tonal language,
which is an excuse for Pratchett to write dialog full of frustrated
non-sequiturs when Rincewind mispronounces a word.
I do have to grumble about the Luggage, though. From a world-building
perspective its subplot makes sense, but the Luggage was always the best
character in the Rincewind stories, and the way it lost all of its
specialness here was oddly sad and depressing. Pratchett also failed to
convince me of the drastic retcon of The Colour of Magic and
The Light Fantastic that he does here (and which I can't talk about
in detail due to spoilers), in part because it's entangled in the
orientalism of the plot.
I'm not sure Pratchett could write a bad book, and I still enjoyed reading
Interesting Times, but I don't think he gave the politics his
normal care, attention, and thoughtful humanism. I hope later books in
this part of the Disc add more nuance, and are less confident and
judgmental. I can't really recommend this one, even though it has some
merits.
Also, just for the record, "may you live in interesting times" is
not
a Chinese curse. It's an English saying that likely was attributed to
China to make it sound exotic, which is the sort of landmine that
good-natured parody of other people's cultures needs to be wary of.
Followed in publication order by Maskerade, and in Rincewind's
personal timeline by The Last Continent.
Rating: 6 out of 10
As a follow-up to yesterday's post listing my favourite memoirs and biographies I read in 2021, today I'll be outlining my favourite works of non-fiction.
Books that just missed the cut include: The Unusual Suspect by Ben Machell for its thrilleresque narrative of a modern-day Robin Hood (and if you get to the end, a completely unexpected twist); Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide to the American Status System as an amusing chaser of sorts to Kate Fox's Watching the English; John Carey's Little History of Poetry for its exhilarating summation of almost four millennia of verse; David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years for numerous historical insights, not least its rejoinder to our dangerously misleading view of ancient barter systems; and, although I didn't treasure everything about it, I won't hesitate to gift Pen Vogler's Scoff to a number of friends over the next year. The weakest book of non-fiction I read this year was undoubtedly Roger Scruton's How to Be a Conservative: I much preferred The Decadent Society for Ross Douthat for my yearly ration of the 'intellectual right'.
I also very much enjoyed reading a number of classic texts from academic sociology, but they are difficult to recommend or even summarise. These included One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. 'These are heavy books', remarks John Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible...
All round-up posts for 2021: Memoir/biography, Non-fiction (this post) & Fiction (coming soon).
Hidden Valley Road (2020)
Robert Kolker
A compelling and disturbing account of the Galvin family six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia which details a journey through the study and misunderstanding of the condition. The story of the Galvin family offers a parallel history of the science of schizophrenia itself, from the era of institutionalisation, lobotomies and the 'schizo mother', to the contemporary search for genetic markers for the disease... all amidst fundamental disagreements about the nature of schizophrenia and, indeed, of all illnesses of the mind. Samples of the Galvins' DNA informed decades of research which, curiously, continues to this day, potentially offering paths to treatment, prediction and even eradication of the disease, although on this last point I fancy that I detect a kind of neo-Victorian hubris that we alone will be the ones to find a cure. Either way, a gentle yet ultimately tragic view of a curiously 'American' family, where the inherent lack of narrative satisfaction brings a frustration and sadness of its own.
Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (2021)
Cat Flyn
In this disarmingly lyrical book, Cat Flyn addresses the twin questions of what happens after humans are gone and how far can our damage to nature be undone. From the forbidden areas of post-war France to the mining regions of Scotland, Islands of Abandonment explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live in an attempt to give us a glimpse into what happens when mankind's impact on nature is, for one reason or another, forced to stop. Needless to say, if anxieties in this area are not curdling away in your subconscious mind, you are probably in some kind of denial.
Through a journey into desolate, eerie and ravaged areas in the world, this artfully-written study offers profound insights into human nature, eschewing the usual dry sawdust of Wikipedia trivia. Indeed, I summed it up to a close friend remarking that, through some kind of hilarious administrative error, the book's publisher accidentally dispatched a poet instead of a scientist to write this book. With glimmers of hope within the (mostly) tragic travelogue, Islands of Abandonment is not only a compelling read, but also a fascinating insight into the relationship between Nature and Man.
The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
Robert O. Paxton
Everyone is absolutely sure they know what fascism is... or at least they feel confident choosing from a buffet of features to suit the political mood. To be sure, this is not a new phenomenon: even as 'early' as 1946, George Orwell complained in Politics and the English Language that the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable . Still, it has proved uncommonly hard to define the core nature of fascism and what differentiates it from related political movements. This is still of great significance in the twenty-first century, for the definition ultimately determines where the powerful label of 'fascist' can be applied today.
Part of the enjoyment of reading this book was having my own cosy definition thoroughly dismantled and replaced with a robust system of abstractions and common themes. This is achieved through a study of the intellectual origins of fascism and how it played out in the streets of Berlin, Rome and Paris. Moreover, unlike Strongmen (see above), fascisms that failed to gain meaningful power are analysed too, including Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Curiously enough, Paxton's own definition of fascism is left to the final chapter, and by the time you reach it, you get an anti-climatic feeling of it being redundant. Indeed, whatever it actually is, fascism is really not quite like any other 'isms' at all, so to try and classify it like one might be a mistake.
In his introduction, Paxton warns that many of those infamous images associated with fascism (eg. Hitler in Triumph of the Will, Mussolini speaking from a balcony, etc.) have the ability to induce facile errors about the fascist leader and the apparent compliance of the crowd. (Contemporary accounts often record how sceptical the common man was of the leader's political message, even if they were transfixed by their oratorical bombast.) As it happens, I thus believe I had something of an advantage of reading this via an audiobook, and completely avoided re-absorbing these iconic images. To me, this was an implicit reminder that, however you choose to reduce it to a definition, fascism is undoubtedly the most visual of all political forms, presenting itself to us in vivid and iconic primary images: ranks of disciplined marching youths, coloured-shirted militants beating up members of demonised minorities; the post-war pictures from the concentration camps...
Still, regardless of you choose to read it, The Anatomy of Fascism is a powerful book that can teach a great deal about fascism in particular and history in general.
What Good are the Arts? (2005)
John CareyWhat Good are the Arts? takes a delightfully sceptical look at the nature of art, and cuts through the sanctimony and cant that inevitably surrounds them. It begins by revealing the flaws in lofty aesthetic theories and, along the way, debunks the claims that art makes us better people. They may certainly bring joy into your life, but by no means do the fine arts make you automatically virtuous. Carey also rejects the entire enterprise of separating things into things that are art and things that are not, making a thoroughly convincing case that there is no transcendental category containing so-called 'true' works of art.
But what is perhaps equally important to what Carey is claiming is the way he does all this. As in, this is an extremely enjoyable book to read, with not only a fine sense of pace and language, but a devilish sense of humour as well. To be clear, What Good are the Arts? it is no crotchety monograph: Leo Tolstoy's *What Is Art? (1897) is hilarious to read in similar ways, but you can't avoid feeling its cantankerous tone holds Tolstoy's argument back. By contrast, Carey makes his argument in a playful sort of manner, in a way that made me slightly sad to read other polemics throughout the year. It's definitely not that modern genre of boomer jeremiad about the young, political correctness or, heaven forbid, 'cancel culture'... which, incidentally, made Carey's 2014 memoir, The Unexpected Professor something of a disappointing follow-up.
Just for fun, Carey later undermines his own argument by arguing at length for the value of one art in particular. Literature, Carey asserts, is the only art capable of reasoning and the only art with the ability to criticise. Perhaps so, and Carey spends a chapter or so contending that fiction has the exclusive power to inspire the mind and move the heart towards practical ends... or at least far better than any work of conceptual art.
Whilst reading this book I found myself taking down innumerable quotations and laughing at the jokes far more than I disagreed. And the sustained and intellectual style of polemic makes this a pretty strong candidate for my favourite overall book of the year.
Review: Out of Office, by Charlie Warzel & Anne Helen Petersen
Publisher:
Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright:
2021
ISBN:
0-593-32010-7
Format:
Kindle
Pages:
260
Out of Office opens with the provocative assertion that you were
not working from home during the pandemic, even if you were among the 42%
of Americans who were able to work remotely.
You were, quite literally, doing your job from home.
But you weren't working from home. You were laboring in confinement
and under duress. Others have described it as living at work. You
were frantically tapping out an email while trying to make lunch and
supervise distance learning. You were stuck alone in a cramped
apartment for weeks, unable to see friends or family, exhausted, and
managing a level of stress you didn't know was possible. Work became
life, and life became work. You weren't thriving. You were
surviving.
The stated goal of this book is to reclaim the concept of working from
home, not only from the pandemic, but also from the boundary-destroying
metastasis of work into non-work life. It does work towards that goal,
but the description of what would be required for working from home to
live up to its promise becomes a sweeping critique of the organization and
conception of work, leaving it nearly as applicable to those who continue
working from an office. Turns out that the main problem with working from
home is the work part, not the "from home" part.
This was a fascinating book to read in conjunction with
A World Without Email. Warzel and
Petersen do the the structural and political analysis that I sometimes
wish Newport would do more of, but as a result offer less concrete advice.
Both, however, have similar diagnoses of the core problems of the sort of
modern office work that could be done from home: it's poorly organized,
poorly managed, and desperately inefficient. Rather than attempting to
fix those problems, which is difficult, structural, and requires thought
and institutional cooperation, we're compensating by working more. This
both doesn't work and isn't sustainable.
Newport has a background in productivity books and a love of systems and
protocols, so his focus in A World Without Email is on building
better systems of communication and organization of work. Warzel and
Petersen come from a background of reporting and cultural critique, so
they put more focus on power imbalances and power-serving myths about the
American dream. Where Newport sees an easy-to-deploy ad hoc work style
that isn't fit for purpose, Warzel and Petersen are more willing to point
out intentional exploitation of workers in the guise of flexibility. But
they arrive at some similar conclusions. The way office work is organized
is not leading to more productivity. Tools like Slack encourage the
public performance of apparent productivity at the cost of the attention
and focus required to do meaningful work. And the process is making us
miserable.
Out of Office is, in part, a discussion of what would be required
to do better work with less stress, but it also shares a goal with Newport
and some (but not most) corners of productivity writing: spend less time
and energy on work. The goal of Out of Office is not to get more
work done. It's to work more efficiently and sustainably and thus work
less. To reclaim the promise of flexibility so that it benefits the
employee and not the employer. To recognize, in the authors' words, that
the office can be a bully, locking people in to commute schedules and
unnatural work patterns, although it also provides valuable moments of
spontaneous human connection. Out of Office tries to envision a
style of work that includes the office sometimes, home sometimes, time
during the day to attend to personal chores or simply to take a mental
break from an unnatural eight hours (or more) of continuous focus,
universal design, real worker-centric flexibility, and an end to the
constant productivity ratchet where faster work simply means more work for
the same pay.
That's a lot of topics for a short book, and structurally this is a grab
bag. Some sections will land and some won't. Loom's video messages sound
like a nightmare to me, and I rolled my eyes heavily at the VR boosterism,
reluctant as it may be. The section on DEI (diversity, equity, and
inclusion) was a valiant effort that at least gestures towards the dismal
track record of most such efforts, but still left me unconvinced that
anyone knows how to improve diversity in an existing organization without
far more brute-force approaches than anyone with power is usually willing
to consider. But there's enough here, and the authors move through topics
quickly enough, that a section that isn't working for you will soon be
over.
And some of the sections that do work are great. For example, the whole
discussion of management.
Many of these companies view middle management as bloat, waste, what
David Graeber would call a "bullshit job." But that's because bad
management is a waste; you're paying someone more money to essentially
annoy everyone around them. And the more people experience that sort
of bad management, and think of it as "just the way it is," the less
they're going to value management in general.
I admit to a lot of confirmation bias here, since I've been ranting about
this for years, but management must be the most wide-spread professional
job for which we ignore both training and capability and assume that
anyone who can do any type of useful work can also manage people doing
that work. It's simply not true, it creates workplaces full of horrible
management, and that in turn creates a deep and unhelpful cynicism about
all management.
There is still a tendency on the left to frame this problem in terms of
class struggle, on the reasonable grounds that for decades under
"scientific management" of manufacturing that's what it was. Managers
were there to overwork workers and extract more profits for the owners,
and labor unions were there to fight back against managers. But while
some of this does happen in the sort of office work this book is focused
on, I think Warzel and Petersen correctly point to a different cause.
"The reason she was underpaid on the team was not because her boss was
cackling in the corner. It was because nobody told the boss it was
their responsibility to look at the fucking spreadsheet."
We don't train managers, we have no clear expectations for what managers
should do, we don't meaningfully measure their performance, we accept a
high-overhead and high-chaos workstyle based on ad hoc one-to-one
communication that de-emphasizes management, and many managers have never
seen good management and therefore have no idea what they're supposed to
be doing. The management problem for many office workers is less
malicious management than incompetent management, or simply no effective
management at all apart from an occasional reorg and a complicated and
mind-numbing annual review form.
The last section of this book (apart from concluding letters to bosses and
workers) is on community, and more specifically on extracting time and
energy from work (via the roadmap in previous chapters) and instead
investing it in the people around you. Much ink has been spilled about
the collapse of American civic life, about how we went from a nation of
joiners to a nation of isolated individual workers with weak and failing
community institutions. Warzel and Petersen correctly lay some blame for
this at the foot of work, and see the reorganization of work and an
increase in work from home (and thus a decrease in commutes) as an
opportunity to reverse that trend.
David Brooks recently filled in for Ezra Klein on his podcast and
talked with University of Chicago professor Leon Kass, which I listened
to shortly after reading this book. In one segment, they talked about
marriage and complained about the decline in marriage rates. They were
looking for causes in people's moral upbringing, in their life priorities,
in the lack of aspiration for permanence in kids these days, and in any
other personal or moral failing that would allow them to be smugly
judgmental. It was a truly remarkable thing to witness. Neither man at
any point in the conversation mentioned either money or time.
Back in the world most Americans live in, real wages have been stagnant
for decades, student loan debt is skyrocketing as people desperately try
to keep up with the ever-shifting requirements for a halfway-decent job,
and work has expanded to fill all hours of the day, even for people who
don't have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Employers have fully
embraced a "flexible" workforce via layoffs, micro-optimizing work
scheduling, eliminating benefits, relying on contract and gig labor, and
embracing exceptional levels of employee turnover. The American worker
has far less of money, time, and stability, three important foundations
for marriage and family as well as participation in most other civic
institutions. People like Brooks and Kass stubbornly cling to their
feelings of moral superiority instead of seeing a resource crisis. Work
has stolen the resources that people previously put into those other areas
of their life. And it's not even using those resources effectively.
That's, in a way, a restatement of the topic of this book. Our current
way of organizing work is not sustainable, healthy, or wise. Working from
home may be part of a strategy for changing it. The pandemic has already
heavily disrupted work, and some of those changes, including increased
working from home, seem likely to stick. That provides a narrow
opportunity to renegotiate our arrangement with work and try to make those
changes stick.
I largely agree with the analysis, but I'm pessimistic. I think the
authors are as well. We're very bad at social change, and there will be
immense pressure for everything to go "back to normal." Those in the best
bargaining position to renegotiate work for themselves are not in the
habit of sharing that renegotiation with anyone else. But I'm somewhat
heartened by how much public discussion there currently is about a more
fundamental renegotiation of the rules of office work. I'm also reminded
of a deceptively profound aphorism from economist Herbert Stein: "If
something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
This book is a bit uneven and is more of a collection of related thoughts
than a cohesive argument, but if you are hungry for more worker-centric
analyses of the dynamics of office work (inside or outside the office), I
think it's worth reading.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Soul Music is the sixteenth Discworld novel and something of a plot
sequel to Reaper Man (although more of a
sequel to the earlier Mort). I would
not start reading the Discworld books here.
Susan is a student in the Quirm College for Young Ladies with an uncanny
habit of turning invisible. Well, not invisible exactly; rather, people
tend to forget that she's there, even when they're in the middle of
talking to her. It's disconcerting for the teachers, but convenient when
one is uninterested in Literature and would rather read a book.
She listened with half an ear to what the rest of the class was doing.
It was a poem about daffodils.
Apparently the poet had liked them very much.
Susan was quite stoic about this. It was a free country. People
could like daffodils if they wanted to. They just should not, in
Susan's very definite opinion, be allowed to take up more than a page
to say so.
She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying
to interfere with it.
Around her, the poet's vision was being taken apart with inexpert
tools.
Susan's determinedly practical education is interrupted by the Death of
Rats, with the help of a talking raven and Binky the horse, and without a
lot of help from Susan, who is decidedly uninterested in being the sort of
girl who goes on adventures. Adventures have a different opinion, since
Susan's grandfather is Death. And Death has wandered off again.
Meanwhile, the bard Imp y Celyn, after an enormous row with his father,
has gone to Ankh-Morpork. This is not going well; among other things, the
Guild of Musicians and their monopoly and membership dues came as a
surprise. But he does meet a dwarf and a troll in the waiting room of the
Guild, and then buys an unusual music instrument in the sort of mysterious
shop that everyone knows has been in that location forever, but which no
one has seen before.
I'm not sure there is such a thing as a bad Discworld novel, but there is
such a thing as an average Discworld novel. At least for me, Soul
Music is one of those. There are some humorous bits, a few good jokes,
one great character, and some nice bits of philosophy, but I found the
plot forgettable and occasionally annoying. Susan is great. Imp is...
not, which is made worse by the fact the reader is eventually expected to
believe Susan cares enough about Imp to drive the plot.
Discworld has always been a mix of parody and Pratchett's own original
creation, and I have always liked the original creation substantially more
than the parody. Soul Music is a parody of rock music, complete
with Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler as an unethical music promoter. The troll
Imp meets makes music by beating rocks together, so they decide to call
their genre "music with rocks in it." The magical instrument Imp buys has
twelve strings and a solid body. Imp y Celyn means "bud of the holly."
You know, like Buddy Holly. Get it?
Pratchett's reference density is often on the edge of overwhelming the
book, but for some reason the parody references in this one felt unusually
forced and obvious to me. I did laugh occasionally, but by the end of the
story the rock music plot had worn out its welcome. This is not helped by
the ending being a mostly incoherent muddle of another parody (admittedly
featuring an excellent motorcycle scene). Unlike
Moving Pictures, which is a similar
parody of Hollywood, Pratchett didn't seem to have much insightful to say
about music. Maybe this will be more your thing if you like constant
Blues Brothers references.
Susan, on the other hand, is wonderful, and for me is the reason to read
this book. She is a delightfully atypical protagonist, and her
interactions with the teachers and other students at the girl's school are
thoroughly enjoyable. I would have happily read a whole book about her,
and more broadly about Death and his family and new-found curiosity about
the world. The Death of Rats was also fun, although more so in
combination with the raven to translate. I wish this part of her story
had a more coherent ending, but I'm looking forward to seeing her in
future books.
Despite my complaints, the parody part of this book wasn't bad. It just
wasn't as good as the rest of the book. I wanted a better platform for
Susan's introduction than a lot of music and band references. If you
really like Pratchett's parodies, your mileage may vary. For me, this
book was fun but forgettable.
Followed, in publication order, by Interesting Times. The next
Death book is Hogfather.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Following on from 2020 in Fiction: In 2020 I read a couple of collections
of short fiction from some of my favourite authors.
I started the year with Christopher Priest's Episodes. The stories within are
collected from throughout his long career, and vary in style and tone. Priest
wrote new little prologues and epilogues for each of the stories, explaining
the context in which they were written. I really enjoyed this additional view
into their construction.
By contrast, Adam Robert's Adam Robots presents the stories on their own
terms. Each of the stories is written in a different mode: one as golden-age
SF, another as a kind of Cyberpunk, for example, although they all blend or
confound sub-genres to some degree. I'm not clever enough to have decoded all
their secrets on a first read, and I would have appreciated some "Cliff's Notes on
any deeper meaning or intent.
Ted Chiang's Exhalation was up to the fantastic standard of his earlier
collection and had some extremely thoughtful explorations of philosophical
ideas. All the stories are strong but one stuck in my mind the longest:
Omphalos)
With my daughter I finished three of Terry Pratchett's short story collections
aimed at children: Dragon at Crumbling Castle; The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner
and The Time-Travelling Caveman. If you are a Pratchett fan and you've
overlooked these because they're aimed at children, take another look. The
quality varies, but there are some true gems in these. Several stories take
place in common settings, either the town of Blackbury, in Gritshire (and the
adjacent Even Moor), or the Welsh border-town of Llandanffwnfafegettupagogo.
The sad thing was knowing that once I'd finished them (and the fourth, Father
Christmas's Fake Beard) that was it: there will be no more.
8/31 of the "books" I read in 2020 were issues of Interzone. Counting them as
"books" for my annual reading goal has encouraged me to read full issues,
whereas before I would likely have only read a couple of stories from each
issue. Reading full issues has rekindled the enjoyment I got out of it when I
first discovered the magazine at the turn of the Century. I am starting to
recognise stories by authors that have written stories in other issues, as well
as common themes from the current era weaving their way into the work (Trump,
Brexit, etc.) No doubt the Pandemic will leave its mark on 2021's stories.
No doubt it was someone's idea of a joke to release Silence of the Lambs on Valentine's Day, thirty years ago today. Although it references Valentines at one point and hints at a deeper relationship between Starling and Lecter, it was clearly too tempting to jeopardise so many date nights. After all, how many couples were going to enjoy their ribeyes medium-rare after watching this?
Given the muted success of Manhunter (1986), Silence of the Lambs was our first real introduction to Dr. Lecter. Indeed, many of the best scenes in this film are introductions: Starling's first encounter with Lecter is probably the best introduction in the whole of cinema, but our preceding introduction to the asylum's factotum carries a lot of cultural weight too, if only because the camera's measured pan around the environment before alighting on Barney has been emulated by so many first-person video games since.
We first see Buffalo Bill at the thirty-two minute mark. (Or, more tellingly, he sees us.) Delaying the viewer's introduction to the film's villain is the mark of a secure and confident screenplay, even if it was popularised by the budget-restricted Jaws (1975) which hides the eponymous shark for one hour and 21 minutes.
It is no mistake that the first thing we see of Starling do is, quite literally, pull herself up out of the unknown. With all of the focus on the Starling Lecter repartee, the viewer's first introduction to Starling is as underappreciated as she herself is to the FBI. Indeed, even before Starling tells Lecter her innermost dreams, we learn almost everything we need to about Starling in the first few minutes: we see her training on an obstacle course in the forest, the unused rope telling us that she is here entirely voluntarily. And we can surely guess why; the passing grade for a woman in the FBI is to top of the class, and Starling's not going to let an early February in Virginia get in the way of that.
We need to wait a full three minutes before we get our first line of dialogue, and in just eight words ("Crawford wants to see you in his office...") we get our confirmation about the FBI too. With no other information other than he can send a messenger out into the cold, we can intuit that Crawford tends to get what Crawford wants. It's just plain "Crawford" too; everyone knows his actual title, his power, "his" office.
The opening minutes also introduce us to the film's use of visual hierarchy. Our Hermes towers above Starling throughout the brief exchange (she must push herself even to stay within the camera's frame). Later, Starling always descends to meet her demons: to the asylum's basement to visit Lecter and down the stairs to meet Buffalo Bill. Conversely, she feels safe enough to reveal her innermost self to Lecter on the fifth floor of the courthouse. (Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019) uses elevation in an analogous way, although a little more subtly.)
The messenger turns to watch Starling run off to Crawford. Are his eyes involuntarily following the movement or he is impressed by Starling's gumption? Or, almost two decades after John Berger's male gaze, is he simply checking her out? The film, thankfully, leaves it to us.
Crawford is our next real introduction, and our glimpse into the film's sympathetic treatment of law enforcement. Note that the first thing that the head of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit does is to lie to Starling about the reason to interview Lecter, despite it being coded as justified within the film's logic. We learn in the book that even Barney deceives Starling, recording her conversations with Lecter and selling her out to the press. (Buffalo Bill always lies to Starling, of course, but I think we can forgive him for that.) Crawford's quasi-compliment of "You grilled me pretty hard on the Bureau's civil rights record in the Hoover years..." then encourages the viewer to conclude that the FBI's has been a paragon of virtue since 1972... All this (as well as her stellar academic record, Crawford's wielding of Starling's fragile femininity at the funeral home and the cool reception she receives from a power-suited Senator Ruth Martin), Starling must be constantly asking herself what it must take for anyone to take her seriously. Indeed, it would be unsurprising if she takes unnecessary risks to make that happen.
The cold open of Hannibal (2001) makes for a worthy comparison. The audience remembers they loved the dialogue between Starling and Lecter, so it is clumsily mentioned. We remember Barney too, so he is shoehorned in as well. Lacking the confidence to introduce new signifiers to its universe, Red Dragon (2002) aside, the hollow, 'clip show' feel of Hannibal is a taste of the zero-calorie sequels to come in the next two decades.
The film is not perfect, and likely never was. Much has been written on the fairly transparent transphobia in Buffalo Bill's desire to wear a suit made out of women's skin, but the film then doubles down on its unflattering portrayal by trying to have it both ways. Starling tells the camera that "there's no correlation between transsexualism and violence," and Lecter (the film's psychoanalytic authority, remember) assures us that Buffalo Bill is "not a real transsexual" anyway. Yet despite those caveats, we are continually shown a TERFy cartoon of a man in a wig tucking his "precious" between his legs and an absurdly phallic gun. And, just we didn't quite get the message, a decent collection of Nazi memorabilia.
The film's director repeated the novel's contention that Buffalo Bill is not actually transgender, but someone so damaged that they are seeking some kind of transformation. This, for a brief moment, almost sounds true, and the film's deranged depiction of what it might be like to be transgender combined with its ambivalence feels distinctly disingenuous to me, especially given that on an audience and Oscar-adjusted basis Silence of the Lambs may very well be the most transphobic film to come out of Hollywood. Still, I remain torn on the death of the author, especially when I discover that Jonathan Demme went on to direct Philadelphia (1993), likely the most positive film about homophobia and HIV.
Nevertheless, as an adaption of Thomas Harris' original novel, the movie is almost flawless. The screenplay excises red herrings and tuns down the volume on some secondary characters. Crucially for the format, it amplifies Lecter's genius by not revealing that he knew everything all along and cuts Buffalo Bill's origin story for good measure too good horror, after all, does not achieve its effect on the screen, but in the mind of the viewer. The added benefit of removing material from the original means that the film has time to slowly ratchet up the tension, and can remain patient and respectful of the viewer's intelligence throughout: it is, you could almost say, "Ready when you are, Sgt. Pembury". Otherwise, the film does not deviate too far from the original, taking the most liberty when it interleaves two narratives for the famous 'two doorbells' feint.
Dr. Lecter's upright stance when we meet him reminds me of the third act of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), another picture freighted with meaningful stairs. Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) began the now-shopworn trope of concealing a weapon in a flower box.
Two other points of deviation from the novel might be worthy of mention. In the book, a great deal is made of Dr. Lecter's penchant for Bach's Goldberg Variations, inducing a cultural resonance with other cinematic villains who have a taste for high art. It is also stressed in the book that it is the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould's recording too, although this is likely an attempt by Harris to demonstrate his own refined sensibilities Lecter would surely have prefered a more historically-informed performance on the harpsichord. Yet it is glaringly obvious that it isn't Gould playing in the film at all; Gould's hypercanonical 1955 recording is faster and focused, whilst his 1981 release is much slower and contemplative. No doubt tedious issues around rights prevented the use of either recording, but I like to imagine that Gould himself nixed the idea.
The second change revolves around the film's most iconic quote. Deep underground, Dr. Lecter tries to spook Starling:
A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
The novel has this as "some fava beans and a big Amarone". No doubt the movie-going audience could not be trusted to know what an Amarone was, just as they were not to capable of recognising a philosopher. Nevertheless, substituting Chianti works better here as it cleverly foreshadows Tuscany (we discover that Lecter is living in Florence in the sequel), and it avoids the un-Lecterian tautology of 'big' Amarone's, I am reliably informed, are big-bodied wines. Like Buffalo Bill's victims.
Yet that's not all. "The audience", according to TV Tropes:
... believe Lecter is merely confessing to one of his crimes. What most people would not know is that a common treatment for Lecter's "brand of crazy" is to use drugs of a class known as MAOIs (monoamine oxidase inhibitors). There are several things one must not eat when taking MAOIs, as they can case fatally low blood pressure, and as a physician and psychiatrist himself, Dr. Lecter would be well aware of this. These things include liver, fava beans, and red wine. In short, Lecter was telling Clarice that he was off his medication.
I could write more, but as they say, I'm having an old friend for dinner. The starling may be a common bird, but The Silence of the Lambs is that extremely rara avis indeed the film that's better than the book. Ta ta...
First up is Minidebconf Tamilnadu 2023 that would be held on 28-29 January 2023. You can find rest of the details 
As a follow-up to yesterday's post listing my favourite 
We first see Buffalo Bill at the thirty-two minute mark. (Or, more tellingly, he sees us.) Delaying the viewer's introduction to the film's villain is the mark of a secure and confident screenplay, even if it was popularised by the budget-restricted Jaws (1975) which hides the eponymous shark for one hour and 21 minutes.
The messenger turns to watch Starling run off to Crawford. Are his eyes involuntarily following the movement or he is impressed by Starling's gumption? Or, almost two decades after John Berger's male gaze, is he simply checking her out? The film, thankfully, leaves it to us.
The cold open of Hannibal (2001) makes for a worthy comparison. The audience remembers they loved the dialogue between Starling and Lecter, so it is clumsily mentioned. We remember Barney too, so he is shoehorned in as well. Lacking the confidence to introduce new signifiers to its universe, Red Dragon (2002) aside, the hollow, 'clip show' feel of Hannibal is a taste of the zero-calorie sequels to come in the next two decades.
Dr. Lecter's upright stance when we meet him reminds me of the third act of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), another picture freighted with meaningful stairs. Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) began the now-shopworn trope of concealing a weapon in a flower box.