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Brought to you by Penguin. The audiobook of Lords and Ladies is narrated by Indira Varma (Game of Thrones; Luther; This Way Up). BAFTA and Golden Globe award-winning actor Bill Nighy (Love Actually; Pirates of the Caribbean; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) reads the footnotes, and Peter Serafinowicz (Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace; Shaun of the Dead) stars as the voice of Death. Featuring a new theme tune composed by James Hannigan.
Slightly better than 3.5* but not as hilarious as the previous books in the Witches subseries. I liked the twist on Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" ( )
Lords and Ladies - Pratchett Audio performance by Indira Varma and additional cast 3.5 stars
What a mash-up. Pratchett gives a nod to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream with the further adventures of Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick. There’s a dark elf invasion that threatens a royal wedding and life as the Discworld knows it.
This is the 14th Discworld book. The wedding serves as a reunion with some of my favorite characters. Mustrum Ridcully is overcome with nostalgia and memories of a past love. Count Casanunda, my favorite dwarf, is focused on current naughtiness with his favorite witch. The Librarian is seriously annoyed, OOOK. Magrat dons armor to fight her own fights. Greebo adds a new element to Schrodinger’s thought experiment. Seal a cat in a box? Three concurrent possibilities; the cat is alive, the cat is dead, the cat is bloody pissed off.
This updated audio performance enhances the experience. I did notice that the ‘original’ theme music has a distinctly Harry Potter vibe. ( )
A fun and chaotic read about a wedding and elven mischief, much like a certain famous play... also featuring a healthy dose of the wonderful Discworld witches and our favorite Librarian. ( )
Now read on . . . When does it start? There are very few starts.
Quotations
In front of her [Nanny Ogg] the cat Greebo, glad to be home again, lay on his back with all four paws in the air, doing his celebrated something-found-in-the-gutter impersonation.
'I learned my craft from Nanny Gripes,' said Granny Weatherwax, 'who learned it from Goody Heggety, who got it from Nanna Plumb, who was taught it by Black Aliss, who --'
'So what you're saying is,' said Diamanda, loading the words into the sentence like cartridges in a chamber, 'that no one has actually learned anything new?'
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice.
Much human ingenuity has gone into finding the ultimate Before. The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded. Other theories about the ultimate start involve gods creating the universe out of the ribs, entrails, and testicles of their father. ** There are quite a lot of these. They are interesting, not for what they tell you about cosmology, but for what they say about people.
People think that they live life as a moving dot traveling from the Past into the Future, with memory streaming out behind them like some kind of mental cometary tail. But memory spreads out in front as well as behind. It’s just that most humans aren’t good at dealing with it, and so it arrives as premonitions, forebodings, intuitions, and hunches. Witches are good at dealing with it, and to suddenly find a blank where these tendrils of the future should be has much the same effect on a witch as emerging from a cloud bank and seeing a team of sherpas looking down on him does on an airline pilot.
Witches can generally come to terms with what actually is, instead of insisting on what ought to be.
Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
Last words
And from the empty hillside, only the silence of the elves.
Brought to you by Penguin. The audiobook of Lords and Ladies is narrated by Indira Varma (Game of Thrones; Luther; This Way Up). BAFTA and Golden Globe award-winning actor Bill Nighy (Love Actually; Pirates of the Caribbean; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) reads the footnotes, and Peter Serafinowicz (Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace; Shaun of the Dead) stars as the voice of Death. Featuring a new theme tune composed by James Hannigan.
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