Jingo
It isn't much of an island that rises up one moonless night from the depths of the Circle Sea -- just a few square miles of silt and some old ruins. Unfortunately, the historically disputed lump of land called Leshp is once again floating directly between Ankh-Morpork and the city of Al-Khali on the coast of Klatch -- which is spark enough to ignite that glorious internationalpastime called "war." Pressed into patriotic service, Commander Sam Vimes thinks he should be leading his loyal watchmen, female watchdwarf, and lady werewolf into battle against local malefactors rather than against uncomfortably well-armed strangers in the Klatchian desert. But war is, after all, simply the greatest of all crimes -- and it's Sir Samuel's sworn duty to seek out criminal masterminds wherever they may be hiding... and lock them away before they can do any real damage. Even the ones on his own side.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
12mentions
9people
2009–2026years
25% recommend75% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I am - hard to be a life long avid reader in the UK and not read Dickens at some point.
I found his books worth reading (and considered in their context as a reaction against the unfairness of society in his time they are indeed classics) but not something I'd say is always pleasurable reading - he feels like Pratchett without the humour, Pratchett had the rage (you can't read say Small Gods or Jingo and not sense the rage) but was warmer about the human experience.
That said we are specifically talking about English majors here - I wouldn't expect an average member of any English speaking country to do that well on Dickens because that is simply not the modern style of written/spoken English but they are English majors so you would expect the overall level to be higher than the general population as a whole.
In the UK reading is on the decline and what people read has fundamentally changed (I'm not competent to say why but to me at least it feels like we have a horrible streak of anti-intellectualism that runs across society).
- The Smoking Gnu! Pratchett was genuinely interested CS and crammed an unusually high amount of modern tech references into his books. The imp-powered PDA devices from Jingo still bring tears to my eyes.
- A friend of mine has been completely obsessed with the Discworld books. I just borrowed "Jingo" and was impressed with how mature it was.(Mature in the ideas presented. The humor is absurd and appropriately silly) Pratchett isn't quite as great as Douglas Adams but is certainly close enough.
- > This shift coincided with a decrease in adjective TTR below a defined threshold, occurring approximately ten years before Pratchett’s formal diagnosis.
The diagnosis was announced in 2007, meaning the shift occurred in 1997. 1997 was after Jingo and before Carpe Jugulum and The Last Continent, and 2007 was after Making Money and before Unseen Academicals.
The Last Continent is the first identified in the paper as below the cutoff for adjectives which they use to identify the start of the decline.
My own feeling is that many of his strongest works were before 2000, though he had several excellent ones after (the City Watch and first two Moist von Lipwig; I know the ongoing Tiffany Aching series are good, but in terms of writing I found them not as intricate as his earlier books.) I found Snuff harder to read, and Raising Steam, sadly, very difficult. I could tell the genius was there, but my memory of the writing was that it used much longer sentences, had less intricate plotting, and far fewer puns and wordplay. It was this book that made me really feel a sense of grief for what was happening to him, and it was this one where I first felt there was an observable threshold that was crossed.
I have sometimes wondered if it would be respectful if another author was brought into assist in editing or rewriting his last two novels. I know his unpublished works were destroyed, and any writing assistance is not his own voice. Yet I feel, in a sense, seeing books with such clear decline could in itself have let his legacy down. I don't know what his own view was or would be. While I admire Sanderson' continuance of the Wheel of Time, I would not wish such a drastic change in tone for some similar effort for the last of Pratchett's works. Yet I deeply wish that his last books were, somehow, different, more representative of him that I feel they were, in that his illness (in a sense, of course!) let him down. They cause me sadness.
GNU Terry Pratchett. (My own site sends this too.)
- > hyperstition
Not to be confused with substition.
> 71-hour Ahmed was not superstitious. He was substitious, which put him in a minority among humans. He didn't believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren't true. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed. There are many such substitions, ranging from ‘It’ll get better if you don’t pick at it’ all the way up to ‘Sometimes things just happen.’
-- Jingo by Terry Pratchett
- > It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson.
> He fished for Curious Squid, so called because, as well as being squid, they were curious. That is to say, their curiosity was the curious thing about them.
> Shortly after they got curious about the lantern that Solid had hung over the stern of his boat, they started to become curious about the way in which various of their number suddenly vanished skywards with a splash.
> Some of them even became curious – very briefly curious – about the sharp barbed thing that was coming very quickly towards them.
> The Curious Squid were extremely curious. Unfortunately, they weren't very good at making connections.
-- Jingo by Terry Pratchett
