Item — HN Reader

I think your comment just goes to show we all have different tastes - I love Moist, and his chain-smoking girlfriend.

There's only one Discworld book I don't like, and it is unseen academicals - the football one - I struggled to finish that, and it's the only one I've read only a single time. Every other discworld book I've read numerous times over the past 20+ years.

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> I think your comment just goes to show we all have different tastes - I love Moist, and his chain-smoking girlfriend.

The one thing I'll fault the Moist books on is they're sort of the same book 3 times if you're in it for the story. If you enjoy the post/finance/rail exploration, that's enough to get past it, and I certainly did, but I can't blame others who didn't.

I voted you up because I don't fully disagree, but the "if you're in it [only] for the story" part is an important conditional. Once you get beyond the story outline similarities, the books feel different in fundamental ways.

For eg., Going Postal and Making Money have the same basic setup, and a one-line story description would sound very similar. But Going Postal is about themes of past and future, regret and risk, connecting to the past while bringing in the future; while Making Money feels like a constant tug-of-war between order and chaos, and hence ultimately about balance.

I'm with you on Moist. As for Unseen Academicals - yes, I think that was one of the ones where Alzheimers was really getting its teeth into him. Raising Steam is similar.

There's a point where you get a lot of rather similar monologues from his characters. I presume these are from the period after he had to dictate as he couldn't write directly any more. If so it's amazing that they're as good as they are.

What an embuggerance (as he said himself).