A Month of Literary Gratitude, Day 14 - Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett

Monday, November 14, 2016

Night Watch was the first of the Discworld books I read. It was given to me as a gift from my friend Michelle, because she's awesome and thought I would enjoy it.


Boy, was she right.

This book is HI-LARIOUS. Laugh out loud in public funny, laugh until you cry funny. No one does a turn of phrase or develops odd characters better than Terry Pratchett, and this book is proof positive of that fact.

I've read many of the Discworld books since I first received this book, and while I've enjoyed them all to a greater or lesser extent, none of them tickled my funny-bone more than Nightwatch.

2 comments:

Random Michelle K said...

I love that book and the whole Night Watch arc. And all the other arcs except Rincewind. :)

Just because I can, here is my favorite Discworld bit--besides OOK.


The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

David said...

Night Watch is my very favorite of all the Discworld books, and I've read them all.

It's the darkest of the series, and in many ways the most humane. I've used the boots theory in my history classes because it gets across a complex notion in such an elegantly simple way.