It was supposed to be a quiet day. We went to IKEA, had meatballs, got a teapot because one of our kids is drinking lots of tea. Tested all the couches. Comfy. All of that amounted to less than 5k steps, which is pretty poor for a weekend day. How do we get to 10k?
So we dropped some options, like “Let’s just do some steps up there in the mountain, take a horizontal path for just half an hour.” But it’s cold today, maybe go higher up where it’s more open and sunny.
One thing lead to another and we reached the top.
The weather was perfect, cold enough to not sweat. Warm enough to not need winter clothing.
Late 90s or early 2000s, I was part of an IRC fan club of Terry Pratchett, called #ankh-morpork. I maintained a website built with html and iframes, dedicated to his works and the IRC channel. As part of this, I translated (poorly) a short story, a pretty grim one, and also pretty short, called Theatre of Cruelty. It showed poverty and death. The Discworld series shows cheerfulness, life, and dodging the bullet. It has trolls, dwarves, vampires and such, living together. But the Theater of Cruelty was just sad, grimdark, cruel. There was no hope in that story.
Dodger is a romance in the Theatre of Cruelty world. One that threatened to be a Romeo and Juliet story. We can speculate how much of Dodger was a result of Pratchett’s declining health but back in 1993, Terry and Lyn Pratchett were already producing that kind of works. Like sticky spots on a clean white table cover. The increased darkness of the Discworld series felt like a gradient, starting with the The Colour of Magic, with 100% cheerfulness and 0% darkness, and ending with the pure horror of his last works.
Dodger was published in 2012. It can be appreciated with no prior knowledge of Discworld. But the final fifth star requires some background. The language is shocking compared to his previous books. It has romance, which is also quite unusual. We had the grimdark world in 1993, long before 2007 when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer. And Tiffany kissed the Wintersmith in 2006.
Speaking of which, there are maybe 2 or 3 of the Discworld books I missed, and Wintersmith is one of them.
5/5, a great book. A blast from the past, and beautifully published with hard covers.
I’m not a big fan of books with short stories. Too much context switching. Context switching is hard. Makes you stop reading the book. Not all short stories are good. Some are bad. Bad stories make you want to throw away the book.
Safe Enough is no exception. But it’s Lee Childs. The good stories are good enough.
4.5/5
PS. Lee Child is known for his short sentences and simple vocabulary. Tried to replicate it in the post.
