Unseen Academicals

[mothwing]

• As is always the case with the more recent books I felt rather apprehensive towards this one. My worries were rather unfounded. It is not a masterpiece compared to many of the books he wrote in the late nineties which I loved, but it does work, and the characters he introduces are charming.
• Romeo and Juliet and football. Yes.
  
• Lady Margolotta. I really like her, but I think I liked her more as an éminence grise. I am not quite clear on why she needed to be bested by Glenda, but she is as charming as ever.
• Lord Vetinari seems to suffer from a spell of Villain Decay, or there is a lot more to Glenda than meets the eye, whose character puzzled me.  
• I love Madame Sharn and Pepe and all their gender complicatedness.
• Dwarf fashion. Dwarf fashion!  Glittering pick-axes just in case the dwarf in question spots a seam and just can't help herself! Hyperfeminine assecories self-confidently invading a traditionally hypermasculine culture. Take that, femmephobia.
• Speaking of which, what does bother me is the recurring coincidence of being dense as a brick and unbelievably stunning. I am about to forgive him because of the utter awesomeness of his other female characters as well as the fact that she is not the only woman who is good-looking, while she is definitely one fo the few dense ones.
• It's always good to see Ridcully again.
  
• Ponder <3. Although it's sad to see that he managed to liberate himself somewhat from the Archchancellor, I rather enjoyed their original relationship.
• Nutt. I'm fairly meh about him apart from in his function as a love interest for Glenda. They are so cute together.
• Trevor. Equally meh.
• Repetitions, gnuh. I wonder what went wrong there. Would it really have hurt to cross out a few "I am an Orc"s or "but I promised my old Mum"'s? These lines were repeated so often that they really annoyed me towards the end.

Comments

[utter-pirate.livejournal.com]

I thought it was ok but very cliched. To be honest, I listened to the audiobook on the bus to work so it is entirely possible that I missed some huge, deeply thoughtful point about the Romea & Juliet/football plot....!

And Ponder truly is <3.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

I also finished it via audio book, but I doubt that you missed anything momentous. :)

Which clichés did you find annoying? I thought the satire was mainly supported by the use of football stereotypes, and maybe I'm not familiar enough with it so that I was oblivious to the more trite elements.

[utter-pirate.livejournal.com]

I dunno, to me it felt like he wasn't actually making fun of the football stereotypes so much as simply describing them.

Sort of like he brought football to the Discworld and adapted the game to fit that world but without making many serious points about it.

The only thing I understood as satire was the mocking of the hatred that fans from one team feel for another for no rational reason. This is indeed silly and should be made fun of. I just didn't feel it was done very effectively.

I admit, my problem with this could be that I've actually developed quite a few fairly irrational hatreds myself - perhaps the satire was too subtle to bite for me because I can vaguely relate to unreasonable antipathies...!

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

I am too unfamiliar with the stereotypes to notice that, probably. The shout-out to Romeo and Juliet worked well for me to capture the ridiculously strong antipathy between fans of opposing teams, and I didn't get much else apart from that because I don't get football.

I do find it interesting how nostalgically attached some British authors are to their terracing and the resulting pushiness from the fans - both Terry Pratchett and Nick Hornby eulogise it in their works and bemoan it's passing.