Reviews and Comments

Last year I committed to a complete re-read of every Discworld novel. However, I skipped all of the City Watch books because they are my favourite books in the series, and I wanted to read them back to back to back to, well you get the idea.

The City Watch books are filled with IMHO the best Discworld characters: Sam Vimes, Captain Carrot, Nobby Nobbs, Angua, Fred Colon, Detritus, Littlebottom, etc. As well, I feel the City Watch books do a great job of filling us in on the machinations and motivations of Lord Vetinari, the patrician of Ankh-Morpork.

Regardless, in The Fifth Elephant we find Commander Vimes begin sent to Überwald on a diplomatic mission where he is embroiled in a plot involving Dwarves, Werewolves and Vampires. I promise you it is hilarious. In a sub-plot Sgt. Fred Colon is left in charge of the City Watch while Commander Vimes is away and he is overwhelmed by the job in a very Peter Principle way.

The Cartographers is a book I should love but I can only muster up enough enthusiasm to give it a 3 star rating. An urban fantasy novel centred around the New York Public Library main branch, yes, please. The characters dig into the possibility that the intentional errors map makers add to the maps in order to copyright them, "phantom settlements" if you will, are in fact, real. While that is an intriguing premise, the execution of it left me feeling a bit confused. Continue on for minor spoilers.

What got me is that the characters in this novel focus is on one "phantom settlement". One character, in particular, is driven to do some pretty awful things to return to the settlement. This really doesn't make a ton of sense. If all of these settlements are real, why is the focus on only one location? Yes, I know they tried to explain the importance late in the book, but I really didn't get it.

Finally, one of the characters makes a "big decision". Even after reading the entire book, I can fathom why they would make this sacrifice when they didn't need to.

The Library of the Dead is the first book of an urban fantasy series by TL Huchu. I thought it was a good, not great read. The book is well written. The characters and plot are interesting but, for me, it missed the mark on a few levels. I felt that more time could have been spent on world building. We are told that a catastrophe has occurred but we are not given any details as to what happened. While I'm sure that it will be explored in future novels I would have liked a more details on why we are in a dystopian future. As well, the books title promises a library of the dead which is barely touched upon. This is probably a great title for the series overall but not the first book. See Ben Aaronovitch's first book in the Rivers of London series, Midnight Riot. A book who's title changes depending on what country you are in.