Raising Steam (Discworld) (edició 2014)

I was about 30 pages into it the first time I gave up. I started again after a few weeks and this time got about 40% through. It's not a bad book. There's some great walk-on parts with some of my favourite characters and the story is ok, it's just that I feel it's all a little hollow really. At the same time I did kind-of enjoy what I read. It's just that it simply didn't draw me in the way I'd like it to have.

I'll definitely read this at some point. Probably in the not too distant future too. It is a Discworld novel after all's said and done.

Maybe I just need to be in a more Discworldy frame of mind first.
( )

This is one of the industrialization novels in the Discworld series and we get to follow the scoundrel Moist von Lipwig around. It's a funny book, but not one of the great ones.

The main topic in this book is probably the humanization of goblins and the reactionary streams among dwarves. I don't feel Pratchett managed to make any of those plots entertaining apart from some goblin scenes. ( )

Raising Steam doesn't rank among Terry Pratchett's best efforts. Still, his wit, wisdom, and the compassion of his worldview are as strong and as welcome to me as ever.

I've sometimes felt that his more recent works have gotten overly formulaic. This newest entry to the pantheon of Discworld proves the point.

The fact that even his middling, formulaic output still ranks as some of the best social satire in the English language tells us everything we need to know about the man's genius.

More worrying to me, though, is the language in this novel. It feels choppy to me, in a way that his writing isn't normally. His turns of phrase seem to have lost some of the elegance that he used to possess.

Perhaps it's something in the nature of dictating his work now vs. writing it, that has changed how he handles language. I understand the need for this shift in his creative method.

Or it could just be that he had an off day.

In any case, I'm grateful that I still get to read new works from him. ( )

Welcome the age of reason, one and all, and see how math can be personified in the shape of steam inside a kettle.

The enthusiasm that overflowed the novel was joyful and catching, sweeping up so many long-standard pillars of discworld and carrying them all into the future. It was a good end, if, indeed, it is the end. The cameos of so many characters lent it that inevitable feel. I don't know, since I haven't been keeping up with any official statements or the desires of Mr. Pratchett, but my intuition tells me he's wrapping things up.

The novel, while skimming over events so quickly as to be nothing more than steam, still showed us how fast the world could change, and how irrevocably it did so.

Not my favourite discworld novel, I was still thoroughly amused by Mr. Moist, who is one of my favourite characters.

( )

This ought to have been a wonderful read: the fortieth Discworld novel, featuring Moist von Lipwig and Commander Grimes coming to grips with the invention of the steam train and revisionist Dwarf terrorists, challenging the Koom Valley Accord. Big themes are brought to the table: how subversion whispers in the dark, spreading fear and denying truth; how there is something magical and dangerous about a new technology; how the men who tinker endlessly and obsessively can become a bigger threat to the status quo than any terrorist and how, in the end, love is a greater driving force than steam.

And yet, this wasn’t a great Terry Pratchett book. Something was missing.

Perhaps is was the righteous anger of “Thud” where the only sane way to win the war was to cancel the battle

“What kind of creature defines itself by hatred?”

Or the irrepressible, maniacal optimism of “Going Postal” where a tyrant puts a criminal in charge of the Post Office because of the criminal sees the world differently

“If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.”

Or perhaps it was the mysterious absence from the Watch of Captain Carrot, the world’s tallest dwarf.

Or maybe it was just that this is first time I’ve listened to a Discworld book rather than reading it for myself and the flat narration detracted from the experience.

Whatever it was, it left me disappointed.

It also left me determined to go back an re-read the Discworld books that filled me with joy and tears and a practical human politics: “Guards, Guards, Guards,” “Witches Abroad”, “The Night Watch”, “Small Gods”, “Thud”, “Going Postal”, “The Truth”. ( )