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Reading: Men At Arms and The Silkworm
Feb. 21st, 2016 07:31 pmI re-read Men At Arms the week before last, partly because reading Guards! Guards! last month has put me in the mood for a proper City Watch re-read and partly because ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fail_fandomanon had been talking about Mark Read's reading (or misreading) of it and that made me think of it when I was choosing what to read. Like Guards! Guards!, Men At Arms is a book I didn't really get on first reading; I seem to remember it taking me an embarrassingly long time to work out what a gonne was, never mind appreciating Pterry's brilliant portrayal of a complex and often corrupt multicultural society full of ethnic tensions and the Watch as the thin line holding it back from total chaos. Even though Vimes does get somewhat sidelined for part of the book, allowing Carrot's essential Lawful Goodness a chance to shine, it's still much more his story than I ever realised first time round, as he struggles to enforce the law in a city that still thinks the law is mostly a joke and has to deal with his own internalised prejudices against other species.
After that, I was in the mood for more hardbitten detective action, so decided to read The Silkworm, the second of JK Rowling's novels written as Robert Galbraith. I read The Cuckoo's Calling a few months ago and liked it a lot, and for my money The Silkworm was even better. Her detective, Cormoran Strike, and his assistant, Robin, are likeable and engaging characters, the plot was as enjoyably twisty as I'd expect from Rowling, and the supporting cast of literary types was entertainingly grotesque. I also enjoyed the way she manages to weave in enough of Strike and Robin's personal lives to make me interested in them as people, as well as in the whodunnit plot (I want to read the next book to find out how they're doing*) but not so much that it makes it all about them and not the crime. Ultimately, she may not be the greatest writer of all time, but she's really good at plot and character and it's rather nice to read an old-fashioned detective novel that doesn't involve serial killers**.
* Though I am a little worried that the series is going to end up with them together, because I rather like them as friends and colleagues.
** I hate serial killer stories, though I did read Val McDermid's The Mermaids Singing a couple of years ago and hated that less than normal because the serial killer - unusually, as far as I can see - wasn't targetting women.
fail_fandomanon had been talking about Mark Read's reading (or misreading) of it and that made me think of it when I was choosing what to read. Like Guards! Guards!, Men At Arms is a book I didn't really get on first reading; I seem to remember it taking me an embarrassingly long time to work out what a gonne was, never mind appreciating Pterry's brilliant portrayal of a complex and often corrupt multicultural society full of ethnic tensions and the Watch as the thin line holding it back from total chaos. Even though Vimes does get somewhat sidelined for part of the book, allowing Carrot's essential Lawful Goodness a chance to shine, it's still much more his story than I ever realised first time round, as he struggles to enforce the law in a city that still thinks the law is mostly a joke and has to deal with his own internalised prejudices against other species.After that, I was in the mood for more hardbitten detective action, so decided to read The Silkworm, the second of JK Rowling's novels written as Robert Galbraith. I read The Cuckoo's Calling a few months ago and liked it a lot, and for my money The Silkworm was even better. Her detective, Cormoran Strike, and his assistant, Robin, are likeable and engaging characters, the plot was as enjoyably twisty as I'd expect from Rowling, and the supporting cast of literary types was entertainingly grotesque. I also enjoyed the way she manages to weave in enough of Strike and Robin's personal lives to make me interested in them as people, as well as in the whodunnit plot (I want to read the next book to find out how they're doing*) but not so much that it makes it all about them and not the crime. Ultimately, she may not be the greatest writer of all time, but she's really good at plot and character and it's rather nice to read an old-fashioned detective novel that doesn't involve serial killers**.
* Though I am a little worried that the series is going to end up with them together, because I rather like them as friends and colleagues.
** I hate serial killer stories, though I did read Val McDermid's The Mermaids Singing a couple of years ago and hated that less than normal because the serial killer - unusually, as far as I can see - wasn't targetting women.
