Second paragraph of third section:
That statement is not really true.
I think this was the first book I read by Terry Pratchett, and it was a delight to come back to it. The jokes are still funny, if no longer unexpected; the Luggage remains one of the greatest ever characters with no dialogue; and the overall plot of the world ending, or rather finding new birth, with the spell in Rincewind’s head key to the resolution, remains engaging. Perhaps now that I am 55 rather than a teenager, Cohen the Barbarian is not quite as funny a character.
The one joke that really made me laugh this time, and compelled me to read it out to my long-suffering spouse, was this:
He read that the Great Pyramid of Tsort, now long vanished, was made of one million, three thousand and ten limestone blocks. He read that ten thousand slaves had been worked to death in its building. He learned that it was a maze of secret passages, their walls reputedly decorated with the distilled wisdom of ancient Tsort. He read that its height plus its length divided by half its width equalled exactly 1.67563, or precisely 1,237.98712567 times the difference between the distance to the sun and the weight of a small orange. He learned that sixty years had been devoted entirely to its construction.
It all seemed, he thought, to be rather a lot of trouble to go to just to sharpen a razor blade.
This was the top book by Terry Pratchett which I had not yet reviewed online. Since I am taking them in popularity order (as measured by LibraryThing), the next is Guards! Guards!.
Here’s the full original Kirby cover.
