A Hat Full of Sky
Something is coming after Tiffany...Tiffany Aching is ready to begin her apprenticeship in magic. She expects spells and magic -- not chores and ill-tempered nanny goats! Surely there must be more to witchcraft than this!What Tiffany doesn't know is that an insidious, disembodied creature is pursuing her. This time, neither Mistress Weatherwax (the greatest witch in the world) nor the fierce, six-inch-high Wee Free Men can protect her. In the end, it will take all of Tiffany's inner strength to save herself... if it can be done at all.A Story of Discworld
Stats for nerds
3recommend
5mentions
5people
2010–2026years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Since no one has mentioned it so far, I recommend the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. This year, I finished (numbers in Discworld order, annotated by the series):
9. Eric [Rincewind]
10. Moving Pictures [Independent]
12. Witches Abroad [Witches]
18. Maskerade [Witches]
19. Feet of clay [The City Watch]
23. Carpe Jugulum [Witches]
32. A Hat Full of Sky [Tiffany Aching]
37. Unseen Academicals [Wizards]
38. I Shall Wear Midnight [Tiffany Aching]
Brilliant series, highly recommended. Whenever I feel down, I re-read one of the Witches series - I spot something I never noticed before - an immediate mood-booster!
- Recently finished:
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow -- frankly, I found it kind of boring, and also found the narrator unsympathetic. I'm not sure if the author intended him to be an Unreliable Narrator or not.
Facts, Values, and Norms by Peter Railton -- Gains three stars for combining serious consideration of ethical and meta-ethical issues with a completely naturalistic worldview and a genuine grappling with history and ideology. Loses two stars for being far, far too long-winded and using vague, colloquial terminology and appeals to intuition where a methodoological naturalist can and should appeal to the fruits of science. (Copy-pasta'd from my Amazon review)
Rapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross -- pretty funny, even if it made a transhuman superintelligent supercivilization look kind of... dumb.
Currently re-reading for fun:
The Wee Free Men and I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett -- It's Discworld. Go read them. NOW. And read A Hat Full of Sky in the middle.
Then there's been a lot of textbooks I've been reading, which I won't list. Though...
Logical Labyrinths by Raymond Smullyan -- dense, and fun, a graduate-level intro textbook to first-order logic disguised as a logic textbook.
- Redliners by David Drake. Burned out soldiers are sent to baby-sit a planetary colonization. Fortunately for the story it turns out to be a planet full of monsters. Baen Free Library.
Accelerando, Iron Sunrise, and Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. Singularity stories.
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. Supernatural meta-fiction with half the story in the footnotes. Reminiscent of the movie Donnie Darko.
Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. Private eye gets retained by the White House to track down the other U.S. Constitution. To quote William Gibson, "Stop It. You're frightening me."
Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg. Story of his teenage daughter's descent into manic psychosis.
A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett. Kids' stories, so they have wall-to-wall story, unlike some of his more situational adult books.
James H. Schmitz science fiction stories. Available from the Baen Free Library of digital books.
- Yes, they did.
> Eight titles were excluded from the analysis due to them being either shorter than the other full-length novels (Eric, 1990; The Last Hero, 2001), or because they are part of his titles for younger readers (The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, 2001; The Wee Free Men, 2003; A Hat Full of Sky, 2004; Wintersmith, 2006; I Shall Wear Midnight, 2010; The Shepherds Crown, 2015).
I've been reading A Hat Full of Sky to my daughter these days, and there's a running joke that "supposedly intelligent people" don't know the meaning of the word "egress", mixing it up with things like egret, ogress or eagles.YOU ARE NOT AFRAID? 'Not yet. But, er...which way to the egress, please?' There was a pause. Then Death said, in a puzzled voice: ISN'T THAT A FEMALE EAGLE?(See also the inspiration for the joke: https://unrealfacts.com/pt-barnum-would-trick-people-with-a-... )
