bluejayreads's reviews
847 reviews

As much as I love Commander Sam Vimes as a character, I often struggle with the City Watch books. And much of that is just because of their topics – they tend to be the most overtly political of the Discworld books, and as Commander Vimes is the Discworld equivalent of a police chief, often lean towards the police procedural and/or mystery ends of the plot spectrum. None of these are things I’m particularly fond of. 

So for the first roughly half of this book, which primarily a murder mystery about who murdered one particular dwarf, I struggled quite a bit. There were some promising elements, to be sure. I was especially hopeful that we might get some character work as Commander Vimes was forced to confront his racism against vampires – but it ended up being Angua who had to wrestle personal anti-vampire sentiment, and everything on Vimes’ end shook out in a less-than-ideal way. There was definitely a lot more to this plot than a simple murder mystery, and even more than an escalation of the dwarf-troll tensions that have run through the past couple City Watch books. But it took a while to actually get going on that.

Once it actually got going, it was quite good. And if I’m honest, even the early parts weren’t bad – they just weren’t exactly to my taste. This book is one of the heavier entries in the Discworld canon, full of both literal and figurative darkness, a lot of prejudice and hatred, and some very real threats to our protagonists’ life, limbs, and even loved ones. It was well-written and entertaining, but felt confused at many points. The themes and messages got muddled, to the point where I can’t pick out anything beyond the obvious “war bad” and “history is written by biased tellers.” And the plot was fantastically complicated. Commander Vimes struggled to put it all together, and so did I. And it didn’t feel like one of those complex plots that made sense once you knew the answer. In fact, even knowing how everything shook out I felt like I still didn’t have all the answers.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an enjoyable read. For all its problems, it’s still well-written, with a cast of interesting characters and enough adventure and zany happenings to keep me engaged, even if I wasn’t always sure how everything fit together. I think it had some potential that it didn’t quite live up to, but it was still a perfectly fine read and I enjoyed it. 

The first book in this series, Notorious Sorcerer, was a wild reading experience. I had absolutely no idea what was going on with the world or the city or the magic system or anything, but the story and characters and little details were so much fun that “no clue how this world or magic works” got downgraded from a dealbreaker to a minor annoyance. I was willing to read book two not because I expected something really coherent, but because I anticipated it being quite enjoyable in addition to being mildly confusing. 

In the beginning, though, it was very much not. In fact, I very nearly gave up on it because it started out vastly different from what I expected. The ending of book one left Siyon, if not respected, at least grudgingly accepted as a valid sorcerer person. He immediately used this to get people’s using-magic-improperly charges dismissed and attempting other political-type things. Which is very much in character for him but also very much not interesting to me. For a bit I was afraid this book’s story was going to be “we sorted out all the magical shenanigans, now let’s look at how that influenced the political and social order of this world.” Which is interesting as a fantasy book concept, but not a book I actually want to read. 

But even though politics remained an element in the story, we eventually got back to the magical shenanigans that I came here for. Now that the Mundane has a Power again, it’s got weird stuff happening as it tries to figure its place out again. Nobody really knows what’s going on, but it’s all highly readable. Many of the side characters had subplots, including one with Zagiri’s older sister that I absolutely adored. It introduced some new characters, all of whom were solid and engaging, though varying degrees of likeable. The Bravi were surprisingly involved, considering that Siyon isn’t one anymore and Zagiri is barely one, so it had more of their antics as well. 

The weirdest thing about this book to me, though, is that even though the crux of the plot is that everything the characters thought was the foundation of their world has become untrue (or maybe was never true in the first place), I somehow actually started getting a sense of the rules of the world. I still couldn’t entirely explain to you how magic works or what, precisely, happened to the part of the city that fell into the sea but is also still there. But I at least feel like I understand the basic foundation of this world and its magic system and who and why the Azatani and the Bravi are and whatnot. It only took one and a half books for me to start actually wrapping my head around all of this basic worldbuilding stuff. You’d think that would be a problem, but the story is quite entertaining and fun so all things considered, not as big a deal as you would expect. 

I really don’t have a ton to say about this book. It was fun. I was entertained the whole way through. I can’t say Shadow Baron was better than, or even necessarily as good as, Notorious Sorcerer. But I had a good time with the reading. This series has so far read like a series designed to be chock full of things that are fun and entertaining and interesting, with a few things dashed in to give it just enough depth to keep from being dismissed as silly and shallow. But if you’re looking for a fun time and you’re okay if it’s not always easy to follow the details, you’ll enjoy it. I for some reason had it in my head that the Burnished City series was a duology, so I was a bit surprised when I got to the end and nothing was actually resolved, but I enjoyed this one enough to read book three. 

The Industrial Revolution sub-series of Discworld books has tended to be one of the more challenging ones for me. It doesn’t have one primary character like the Rincewind or Tiffany Aching sub-series, or even a cast of primary characters like the Witches or City Watch sub-series. The Industrial Revolution books are grouped not by character but by theme – some new invention or concept comes to the Discworld and makes things just a little more “modern.” Which just adds to the challenge, because I really enjoy the weird magical whimsy of the earlier books and I’m not sure a change for the modern is necessarily a change for the better. 

But now that I’ve said all that, the good news about Going Postal is that none of these things actually bothered me. The modernization aspect wasn’t a huge issue for me because the clacks has been around long enough for me to get used to it, and Moist von Lipwig’s assignment of getting the old postal service functioning again had enough history and tradition tied up in the building and institution that it didn’t feel particularly modern. And the character thing wasn’t a huge issue either because even though Moist is a new character, he was fun and entertaining right off the bat. He is very much a con man who suddenly has to deal with the fact that he is now an “honest man” with a government job – but that doesn’t stop him from having an arsenal of con man tricks up his sleeve. And he has very few compunctions about using them in support of his new job, because he may be a con man but he’s got a challenge in front of him and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t give it his best shot. The fact that being successful at this will keep him on Lord Vetinari’s good side is a bonus. 

Plus, I loved the concept of the post office. There were so many scenes I just eagerly devoured because the post office was weird and wonderful and full of opportunity and I just want to go there and get it all cleaned up and functional again. I love a good organizing challenge, and the post office, gone largely to ruin and full of decades of undelivered mail, is exactly that. (That aspect of it didn’t get resolved quite how I’d hoped, but I can still dream.) I’m a sucker for big, weird, long-abandoned buildings, and while the post office is technically not abandoned, it still fits the bill. 

And this is all without even touching on everything new we learn about the golems, the drama and crimes happening in the leadership of the Grand Trunk clacks company, the wild world of pin collecting, Moist’s instance on always increasing the stakes leading him into some absolutely wacky situations, and more. There’s a lot going on in this book, a lot more than you would anticipate in a story about a con man operating a mostly-defunct post office. (Although now that I write that out, maybe exactly as much as you would anticipate in that kind of story.) It’s funny, it’s wacky, it’s zany, it’s clever, it’s entertaining, it has just enough dark and/or serious moments to anchor the story without making it too dark and serious. An entertaining, enjoyable Discworld book. And I’m looking forward to future ones – I’m pretty sure Moist features in at least one more Industrial Revolution book, and I’m excited to see what shenanigans he gets up to next. 

I think this is the first time I’ve actually hate-read something. I don’t know how else to explain why I actually finished this book. Either that or I was just hoping that eventually it would get good – although I am not generally the type to stick it out in a book I don’t like, so that would be unusual for me. Hence my hate-read conclusion.

Some of this is related to the book itself. Discovery of LESS is essentially a memoir of how Chris Lovett figured out that cramming your space full of stuff actually makes your life worse and getting rid of the stuff you don’t like and don’t use is a good thing. Not an unreasonable premise – actually, it’s a premise I was quite excited to read, because I generally enjoy books about people’s relationship with objects. But because it’s a memoir, what I think about this book is inextricably tied to what I think about the author. And I do not like this author very much.

Generally I try to avoid attacking the author in my reviews. I know that people have different opinions, every writer has to start somewhere, and even good authors can have a book that flops. But I have to ascribe some of the blame for this book to the author, because he portrays himself as just an utter ass.

Chris writes about his past clutter-having self with a perverse kind of glee at his own idiocy. I hope that he’s exaggerating some of the descriptions of extreme clutter for effect, but either way, he makes himself out in this book as a thundering blockhead who couldn’t seem to comprehend that he could just get rid of things that were broken or that he didn’t like. The process of getting rid of things could have been humbling or enlightening, but for the caricature masquerading as the author in this story, it was self-aggrandizing. As written, he wasn’t really recognizing that stuff didn’t solve his problems or reckoning with whatever drove him to compulsively purchase or even revising his relationship with objects – he was the person to discover this path to true happiness and that made him the savior of people with too much stuff in their homes. After spending six months traveling the world to truly master his new technique, the first thing he did upon returning was semi-forcibly convert his reluctant parents to his new Gospel of Owning LESS.

Everything in this book comes off as incredibly self-centered. Chris has a girlfriend who lives with him and goes on this minimalism journey with him, but though she’s mentioned here and there, we never get any impression of what she thought of his new determination not to own things, or why she decided to do it herself, or even whether she was minimizing her possessions voluntarily or felt pressured to do so by her boyfriend’s all-consuming new mission. Not only does it not feel like Chris was involving his long-term partner in any decisions about this huge lifestyle change, she only barely passes the “there’s textual evidence that people besides the protagonist can see her” test. The focus is all on Chris, including absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary digressions into things like why he thinks it’s a fashion faux pas to wear two scarves to meet up with someone for a mid-day beer. (The whole meeting could have been reduced to a sentence or two with no loss to the overall narrative.) The insistence on including every detail about what he thought and felt and did, practically to the point of boredom, combined with the utter lack of insight or even real conversation with anyone else, made him come off as unbelievably selfish, self-important, and self-centered.

I have a really hard time believing that people heard his story and told him he should write a book, because I’m reading his story and all I can think is, “Dude, shut the hell up.” Chris may believe strongly in less possessions, but he certainly doesn’t believe in less words.

I really wanted this to be something useful or at least enjoyable, but this book is neither. The author comes off like a self-righteous ass, and the narrative is bogged down in so many unimportant digressions made essential by the fact that Chris thought of them that even the potentially interesting parts become aggressively unrelatable. I kept waiting for something to happen that would make this book more than “guy discovers less stuff is nice and becomes minimalism evangelist,” but it did not. I don’t want to say that I don’t like Chris Lovett himself, because I haven’t met him in real life and likely never will. But I definitely do not like the likely-somewhat-fictionalized version of himself portrayed in this book. 

This book is third in a series. I read book one in 2017 and book two in 2018. So I have been away from this world and these characters for a long time. I almost didn’t read this book just because it has been so long and I wasn’t sure if bumbling in confusion through a story just for the sake of saying I completed a series was worth it. But I finally decided to check the book out from the library and at least give it a try. Worst comes to worst, I could not finish it and say I gave it my best effort. 

I will give Wayward Witch a lot of credit here: Despite having not touched anything Brooklyn Brujas for six years, it actually was not that hard to catch up with the story and the relevant events from previous books. Some of that is because this book follows Rose, who wasn’t a major participant in much of the earlier books (she spent the entirety of book one stuck in a tree, for example). So she was aware of the events, but mostly didn’t directly experience them. And some of that is because the narrative itself did a spectacular job gently reminding me of the relevant context. I know I’ve still forgotten most of the details, but between what I remembered, what the narrative reminded me about, and the things I was able to infer between what the narrative told me and the characters’ actions, I quickly got enough of the big picture to be able to follow the emotional arcs of the story. 

Perhaps it’s the missing details, though, that would have made this story feel solid and complete. Whatever the reason, I had a lot of problems with this book. The world is fascinating – like Labyrinth Lost, most of it takes place in a supernatural realm separated from our own where a Mortiz sister has to do some heroics to save the day. In this case, it’s Adas, land of the fairies. Of course, these are the tall, unfeeling, practically immortal type of fairy, and they need her unique kind of magic to help them them stop a terrible destructive force. It’s engaging, full of strange peoples and weird creatures and breathtaking scenery and fae people just strange enough to feel unnerving. Honestly, I would be happy to spend more time in Adas. 

But everything else about the book feels jumbled together and lacks coherence. If you look at the beginning of the book versus the end, Rose appears to have gone on some deep emotional journey about accepting her unusual brand of magic and forgiving her father. But it must have happened off-page, because I didn’t see any actual emotional journey of any kind happening (unless you count the one scene where she accidentally gets dosed with magic truth serum and talks about all the things she’s scared of). 

The plot on the whole was reasonable and the twist was great and came as a surprise. But nothing else seemed to fit. Rose, and sometimes other characters, would react logically to some things and severely under-react to others. The relationships between Rose and the other people she was traveling with seemed to swing between cordial and mildly hostile for no discernable reason – it certainly doesn’t seem to be anything Rose does, because at one point she does something that I would have expected to make her Group Enemy #1, but nobody ever mentions it again. (There are also a few copyediting errors – mistaken capitalization, “thing” instead of “think,” etc. – that reduced my confidence in the whole thing.) 

Honestly, it was fine. There were definitely issues, but none of them made the story unreadable. I finished the book, and I actually enjoyed much of it. But it does have a feeling of being written not so much because the author felt like each Mortiz sister had to have her own book, but because the author signed a contract for three books so had to write a third book. There were some good bones in this story, but it really needed a lot more focus and a lot more work on what exactly these characters were doing here. I liked it for the most part, but it felt like a weak ending to what I recall being a pretty solid series in previous books. 

Audio is not the best format for this book; will come back to it once I get my hands on a print copy.