Rincewind, Cohen, and the Luggage are back!  YAY!

Discussion amongst old (one's in a wheelchair) marauding barbarians who are a bit too old to be marauding anymore,  about what happens if they get caught while breaking into the Forbidden City and are sentenced to being hung, drawn, and quartered:

" I believe it's a punishment similar to hanging, drawing and quartering...."

"How are you drawn then?"

"I think your innards are cut out and shown to you."

"What for?" 

"I don't really know.  To see if you recognize them, I suppose."

"What...like,  'Yep, that's my kidney, yep, that's my breakfast'?"

Couple paragraphs later:

"How are you hung?"

snickers

Interesting Times is from the Rincewind subseries of Discworld.  It’s been quite a few books since I’ve seen Rincewind, so it was fun to see him again.  He always makes me laugh. 

If you’ve read the earlier books, you may remember that Rincewind once had some adventures with Twoflower, a visitor from the Counterweight continent.  In this book Rincewind finds himself, quite against his will of course, dropping in on the Counterweight continent and getting caught up in a revolution. 

It was a lot of fun seeing Twoflower again, although we didn’t see as much of him as I would have liked.  Cohen the Barbarian, an elderly hero, also shows up in this book along with his “horde” which consists of a bunch of other elderly barbarian heroes plus a former school teacher.  I thought the horde was really funny.  The book alternates, for the most part, between the stuff happening with Rincewind and the stuff happening with the horde. 

There were some really funny parts in this book.  October is full of business travel for me, and I was sitting in a hotel room trying very hard to stifle my laughter while reading the section where Rincewind tries to read a story written with pictograms [urinating dog, urinating dog].  It just got funnier the longer it went on.  The story itself was ok.  I didn’t think it wasn’t anything special, but the humor made up for it.

Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett

Discworld #17

Interesting Times opens on a deserted island where Rincewind is happily spending his days coping with boredom.  We don’t know exactly how he got there, but that doesn’t really matter.  He’s dealing with things like coconut surprise (surprise: it’s coconut), and the Luggage hunts sharks (although they don’t taste very good).  The only thing the island seems to lack is potatoes. Of course, just as Rincewind seems about to be propositioned in a rather ridiculous fashion, he’s whisked away by the wizards at Unseen University, so they can send him across the Disc to the Agatean Empire (think the Discworld’s version of China).

 Rincewind finds Cohen the Barbarian there with his Silver Horde (his gang of geriatric barbarian heroes), and the narrative diverges here as we follow both Rincewind and Cohen.  Rincewind, of course, tries to run away and gets tangled up in the Red Army, who are really terrible at subversive slogans.  Cohen and his gang are there to pull off a caper, and I quite liked what it turned out they were trying to steal.  There are a lot of jokes about civilization, and you get to take them as deep as you like.

Although I’ll admit they were contrived by design, I was impressed at how well Terry Pratchett had interwoven his scene breaks early on in the novel.  I’ve read this book so many times I don’t really know how to rate it.  It just is, kind of like the platypus (wait, that’s a different book, never mind).  Unusually for Discworld, there is a kind of tie-in to the next Rincewind novel, but it’s basically just a final joke scene.

Anyway, despite having read it multiple times, this book is still fun, with appearances by Rincewind (of course), all the wizards, Hex, and Cohen and brief cameos of the Lady, the Patrician, and Death.  I always like Pretty Butterfly threatening Rincewind to keep him in line, and the Quantum Weather Butterfly, <i>Papilio tempestae</i>.  And I can just picture the exchanges between Rincewind and the Silver Horde so clearly when they meet.  And the exchanges between the wizards.  And Rincewind ranting about running away from danger in order to run away another day.  And stuff like this:

"‘Listen to me, will you?’ he said, settling down a little. ‘I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It’s never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting “Forward, brave comrades!” you’ll see he’s the one behind the bloody big rock and wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet! Understand?’
He stopped. The cadre were looking at him as if he was mad. He stared at their young, keen faces, and felt very, very old.
‘But there are causes worth dying for,’ said Butterfly.
‘No, there aren’t! Because you’ve only got one life but you can pick up another five causes on any street corner!’
‘Good grief, how can you live with a philosophy like that?’
Rincewind took a deep breath.
‘Continuously!’"