CRB15 Book 45-46: "Men at Arms" and "Feet of Clay" by Terry Pratchett

CBR15 Bingo: Nostalgia

Total page count: 733 pages

Rating both books: 4 stars

In Men at Arms, there's a series of mysterious deaths in Ankh-Morpork, and the Patrician, Lord Vetinari, strictly forbids Sam Vimes, the head of the City Watch to investigate, thus ensuring that he will do the exact opposite. Vimes, Carrot, Nobbs and Colon, who used to be the whole of the Watch have been joined by new recruits to diversify the Watch, Cuddy (a dwarf), Detritus (a troll) and Angua (a werewolf, although Carrot believes it to be because she's a woman). As the ragtag group of individuals learn to work together (trolls and dwarfs are sworn enemies), it turns out that the murder is part of a plot to replace Vetinari with a king, since the plotters have discovered who is the rightful heir. As well as 'disobeying' Vetinari and investigating the string of murders, Vimes is also super stressed about his upcoming wedding to Lady Sybil Vimes, the richest woman in Ankh-Morpork (who insists on being traditional and transferring all of her money and assets to Vimes upon their marriage). 

In Feet of Clay, Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the ever-growing City Watch (he was both promoted and knighted at the end of the previous book) and his various underlings have to figure out why a museum curator and a priest have been murdered, and why shortly after, a dozen golems, working at various factories around the city very dramatically and publically kill themselves. To add to the complications, someone is clearly trying to assassinate Lord Vetinary, and he keeps getting worse no matter what safety precautions an increasingly more frantic Vimes puts in place. 

Obviously, in each of the books, the rather complicated central mysteries are eventually sold, and at the end of each book, poor Samuel Vimes seems to end up promoted into an even higher social sphere as a reward for his loyal service. The Watch keeps expanding, in Feet of Clay, Cheery Littlebottom, a dwarf from Uberwald (think the location of every Hammer horror movie ever) joins the team as a forensic expert and comes to several conclusions about their identity over the course of the book.

A perusal of my blog shows that back in 2010 I read and reviewed quite a few Pratchett novels. I also reviewed my re-read of Soul Music in 2015 and my revisit of Guards Guards in 2021. The meticulous records of my reading history (a lined notebook where I've written down everything I've read since back in 2007 - it'll survive even if technology fails!) show that while Pratchett is an incredibly important writer to me and his books have brought me so much joy over the years, I haven't really re-read many of his books in the last 10-15 years. My husband and my BFF Lydia have both warned me not to read Raising Steam (his penultimate Discworld novel and the book where it's the most clear that Alzheimers had stolen away too much of his brain) and although we have a lovely hardback copy of it on our bookshelf, I still am not emotionally ready enough to read The Shepard's Crown - his very last novel before he died. Especially not now that I lost my mother this winter. If I read his final book, it becomes irrevocable that he's gone. 

Re-reading these books is absolutely nostalgic for me. I read a lot of them during my student years in St. Andrews in Scotland back in the late 1990s-early 2000s and because Pratchett has always been one of my husband's favourite authors, we had a lot of enjoyment reading the books together in the early years of our relationship. The great thing about Pratchett is how versatile he was as an author. He didn't just write police procedural novels with a fantastical twist like he does with the City Watch novels. Because his creativity and cleverness were so vast, he was able to write very funny, but also sharp, insightful, and frequently satirical books and make a lot of astute observations while doing so. Not to mention his mastery of language. There are so many puns - so many amazing turns of phrase. There really was no one entirely like him. 

Judging the books by their covers: My Pratchett novels are the original paperback editions with cover art by Josh Kirby. I know they've been redesigned several times since. While I don't always agree with the way the various characters get depicted on the covers, it's always fun to see plot elements hinted at on each of the covers. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR6 Book 1: "The Golem and the Jinni" by Helene Wecker

Page count: 486 pages
Rating: 5 stars

What a lovely way to start my new reading year. First of all, I want to thank Jen K for this lovely book. She gave it to me as part of the Cannonball Read gift exchange, and as I was fairly sure I wasn't going to be able to do it justice when I was hurrying through books at the end of December to finish my triple Cannonball, I decided that it would be my first book of 2014. As it turns out, due to me getting ill over the Christmas holidays, I was stuck with huge amounts of correction work for the first week and a half of January, and only really able to read on the bus to and from work and in the occasional stolen moment before I passed out exhausted in bed each night. I am given to understand that this may be all the reading, or even more than, the average person does. Well, to me, it's pretty much akin to torture. Suffice to say, the fact that the book was so engrossing made this experience extra frustrating for me. But what is this delightful book about, you ask?

Chava is the titular golem, a woman made of clay supposed to be bound to one master, created by a disgraced and sinister rabbi in Poland. Her master, the man who commissioned her, brings her to life on the sea voyage to America, and dies very shortly after. Hence Chava no longer has one person's commands to obey and begins hearing the thoughts and wishes of all those around her. She arrives alone in New York in 1899, and luckily a kindly rabbi recognises her for what she is and takes her in, determined to teach her to fit in, so she doesn't lose control and use her inhuman strength to harm or kill anyone. He helps her get a job in a bakery, and coaches her to hide her true nature.

Ahmad is the jinni, or djinn. Trapped for centuries in a copper oil flask by a Bedouin wizard, he wakes up on the floor of a tinsmith's shop, with no memory of how he ended up so far away from the Syrian deserts he came from. Arbeely, the young tinsmith is rather shocked to discover that the childhood tales of djinn he was told are apparently true, and does what he can to help Ahmad (a name Arbeely gives him, djinns don't have human names) settle in amongst the residents of little Syria in lower Manhattan. Ahmad may be free of the lamp, but he still has an unbreakable iron cuff around his wrist, forcing him to stay in human shape. He needs to discover how he was trapped in the lamp in the first place, and seeks to find the means to fully free himself.

The book contains a number of interlinked stories, those of Chava and Ahmad are only two of them. There is the story of rabbi Meyer, who takes Chava under his wing and his estrangement from his nephew, Michael. There is the story of the Jewish magician, the disgraced rabbi Schaalman, Chava's creator, as we in flashbacks discover how he came to be the bitter and twisted man who Chava's master approached to have a wife made. There is the story of Mahmoud Saleh, a downtrodden ice cream seller in little Syria, who can't look anyone in the eye, and once used to be a successful doctor back in Syria, the story of socialite Sophia Winston, who catches Ahmad's eye in the park, as well as a number of other characters and stories. In a lot of cases with stories like this, I tend to get bored when the focus shifts away from characters I love, and I am tempted to just skim and skip ahead to get past the sections concerning characters I'm not all that interested in. Wecker writes so compellingly that I was never tempted to do that. I was fascinated with each and every one of the story strands, and curious as to how they would all come together in the end.

Historical fiction featuring fantastical elements from various cultures, the book is pretty much Malin catnip. I'm so very glad I was given this as a gift, otherwise it may have got lost among the hundreds of other books on my TBR list that I hear about, find a bit intriguing and decide to read at some future date. It's a lush and intricate and beautifully told book, with the friendship between the Golem and the Jinni at the centre of it, both incredibly lonely and mythical creatures, delighted to find someone else truly unusual to confide in. I would pretty much recommend this to anyone, and will be buying it as presents for all my friends once it's out in paperback.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.