Plot summary: Discworld Santa (the titular Hogfather) is sort-of-murdered by a psychopath named Teatime and his gang of nitwits, so Death has to fill in for him. Meanwhile, Death's sort-of-granddaughter Susan teams up with the Death of Rats, a random raven, and the God of Hangovers in order to locate the missing tooth fairy. Also various urban legend creatures keep showing up and causing problems for the Unseen University.
And this one properly introduces my second-favorite character: Hex, the Unseen University's magical supercomputer. It uses ants for processing power. It also seems to be one of those giant houses of chaos (like everything I program) whose creators take the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" to heart and no longer know how anything actually works. Or why, if you delete this one seemingly useless piece of code, the entire thing breaks.
Teatime's name is actually pronounced Teh-ah-tim-eh. When |Susan| meets him, even though he tells |her| how it's actually pronounced and you can't actually hear it through the paper, you get the sense that |she's| pronouncing it "tea-time" just to annoy him.
(My favorite part of this entire book: |Death discovering The Little Match-Girl and deciding "HOW ABOUT NOT HAVING THAT."| I read somewhere that that's in the book because of Pratchett having always been dissatisfied with the ending of the original story and deciding to give it a proper one.)
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for some crude humor, alcohol abuse, and probably some bad language.
Favorite lines:
+++Out Of Cheese Error+++
This is one of Hex's favorite error messages, and thus one of his favorite things to say. (I can't find the page number because we already returned the book to the library.)
Appearances of Death count: 3.
(Endnote: Death apparently owns a sword that's so sharp the blade is invisible. You can only tell where it is by the blue flashes of the air molecules it cuts apart. It's going on my list of Top Cool Fictional Swords.)
Your selection of this book, makes me wonder if your time could really be used a little more beneficially.
ReplyDeleteGrandpa o
Hmm... does "reading the other 40ish books in the series" count as using my time more beneficially?
DeleteYou know, I think this may be that third Discworld novel I read! I know I read three of them, I know one was Wyrd Sisters and one was Maskerade, and this sounds extremely familiar, so I bet this was the third. The Little Match Girl thing really rings a bell.
ReplyDeleteThat would make sense.
DeleteIf I were you, Sam, I would not worry if you're using your time beneficially or not in reading this book. You don't need to learn something new from everything you read - right? -grammy
ReplyDelete