i am new and i felt like posting a topic so who likes the book Night Watch it was the first book i ever read of terry pratchetts and to be honest it was one of the first books i have read in many many years.

I'm rereading it as we speak.
It's one of my favorites, as are most of the Watch books.

Carcer still freaks me out. (I'm reading the scene on top of the library now. )

_Light moves faster than sound. That is why some people appear bright, until you hear them speak._

Carcer is one of the best villains Terry has come up with! Total sociopath!

him and his knives, who'd have guessed 3, i just couldnt help noticing the similarities between night watch and the new tv series Life on mars...

There are so many little nuances of Night Watch that you don't get the first time around! My favourite passage is still:

"Vimes had spent his life on the streets and had met decent men and fools, and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar, and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People.

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed in any case. The found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up."

It's clever, it's funny, it's insightful and it's inspiring. Pure Pratchett.

This is one of the reasons to read and reread his novels! He is one of the authors that brings you back so that you can savor his ideas and the ways that he expresses them. All that and humor, too!

"As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up." His criticism isn't for the general populace, with all their good and bad points. The criticism really is against the mindset that says "I am apart and above those others, who are 'things' to be measured."

It reminds me of some of his other books, such as Interesting Times. Rincewind observes that the young revolutionaries have been saying that the people will rule equally. He comments that, in fact, won't the young revolutionaries do the ruling when the "people" take over?

Brief aside: I wish I could find my copy of Interesting Times to find that passage. We've moved and it's still in a box somewhere!

Night Watch! The masterhood of Terry consists of mocking the French Revolution without forgeting the hard boiled egg!

"Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo."

What is all about this hard boiled egg? I'm also reading NW now.

Not quite hard-boiled. Still a bit soft in the middle. And John Keel's hard-boiled egg, kormaciek. If you don't remember that, shame on you, and if you're on a thread before you finish the book, why?

I... like Carcer. I'm not sure why. I just like him. Maybe because he reminds me a bit of me. Always have another knife. But don't worry, everyone. I do have a conscious.

And I hate what he did to the egg. That was Keel's egg.

I completly agree. Friends of mine laugh as i am constantly reading a Pratchett book on the train to and from work. As soon as one is finished its on to the next. I keep circulating the 30+ books until a new one is published.

I have read Guards! Guards! so many times but it still hasnt lost any of the humour. Plus as i got older i found more an more subtle jokes that had passed me by years before!

Absolute genius

i absolutely agree. And yeah-a man's boiled egg shoul be a sacred thing. But Keel got even at the end-Carcer was carried away as a stack of hay

"Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo."

That's conscience, Gawain. ( :cooler: I'm such a bad sister) And no, you don't.

It's not just the French Revolution, tho'. We've been going over Marx in History this week and honestly he sometimes sounds just like Reg. Except smarter, it must be allowed. Sigh...pretty idea, but....

Marx's idea of the communist society was an utopy(like a dream). For him the communist society would be a place with no social classes,no rules and where the State would interfiere as litle as possible. But Lenine and Stalin created a monster out of that idea.

"Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo."

Yes... I suppose that can happen to any idea in the hands of monsters... Although a lot of idea start out monstrous all by themselves. What makes Marx' still interesting today is, I think, his often accurate analysis of many aspects our current system still has today.
Interesting to see where we are disgressing to...

"Hoher Sinn liegt oft im kindischen Spiel." (Friedrich Schiller)

Yes, it is, Hsing.

Yeah...Marx was a pretty sharp analyst about some things; like People Are Both Living And Dying Miserably and This Is Bad, and Something Has to Snap, but he was an optimist about human nature. Not everyone is good. Just because you have suffered something doesn't mean you won't inflict the same thing on another, and the idea that no one who had been oppressed would be willing to become an oppressor was a cornerstone of his ideal. Look at the high incidence of the abused turning abusers.

Other things than cream rise to the top.