u/cptnTiTuS

The very first 50 pages of this book I read while making a grave mistake, reading at night when most of the people in my house were sleeping. It took maybe 10 minutes for them to wake up. My sides hurt from laughing. The further you get into the book the more fun it gets.

Sir Terry Pratchett was nature’s gift to humanity. And I can’t even begin to put into words, just how much fun Disc World is. It’s an entire universe built around parodying fantasy tropes (and everything else, and in between) by telling a fantasy story. Spread across 40-ish books between mid to large sizes. Almost all of them can be read out of order, but there are a few sub-series inside the larger discworld that have shared continuity.

Guards Guards! Is the beginning of the night watch sub series in disc world and it’s a damn good one. There are stakes, character development, everything and everyone gets made fun of and there is general sense of whimsy and goofiness that will make you giggle to yourself in a crowded train, attracting weird looks from bystanders.

Without giving any spoilers, I’d say this book reminds me instantly of classic dry British humour, Monty Python sketches and movies (Particularly Monty Python and the Holy Grail), A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Peep Show, etc.

11/10. If you’re going to read just one Disc World book to see if it’s your thing or not, please read this one. Everyone needs a little bit of comedy in their life, once in a while.

The backdrop of this book is the liberation of the serf in Russia so the large landowners became paranoid about the slave class rising to take their sweet revenge (foreshadowing)

Man, I am forever in awe at what this mf Dostoyevsky could come up with when he was desperate enough. Famously, he wrote this book originally as something entirely different titled “The life of a great sinner” talking about the effects of atheism on the mind and the ideas that influence it. It wasn’t intended as a violent political thriller, instead it was going to be a psychological novel much more personal in nature (as is usual for him).

When Dostoyevsky became aware of an actual real life attempt of revolution by some students, carrying liberal socialist (and honestly, nihilistic) ideas (which I won’t talk about more because spoilers), he decided to scrap the original idea and merged what he had written into this new form and gave birth to “Demons”

In my opinion, this book is his absolute peak. It’s not just a satire and critique of nihilism, it is a haunting prediction of what happens when people truly embrace those ideas. His characters aren’t comically evil villains that you can point and laugh at, to be segregated into black and white, good and evil. They’re very real depictions of people, 3D, living and breathing. Gray, not falling into conventional moral boxes but not existing entirely out of them either. Something in the middle, something that blurs the line at the boundary and capturing thoughts that could rise in the minds of you and I- those are the “demons”.

11/10, will read again. Probably.