The Wee Free Men

By -
The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett -- audiobook read by Stephen Briggs

It's #MarchMagics Pterry Day!  The readalong was Wee Free Men, and I thought I'd try listening to the audiobook, as my mom said it was fantastic.  I don't usually like audiobooks, so this is a departure for me.  (Usually, I lack the patience to listen to a book I know I could be reading about five times faster.  Also I tend to let my mind wander and then I get lost.)

And indeed, the audio version of this book IS fantastic!  It's beautifully read, and Briggs gives everybody a wonderful variety of accents.  I recommend!

Now, in my opinion, the Tiffany Aching series is just about Pterry's apex of writing.  It would probably be hard to get any better.  The way he managed to blend humor, myth, and Big Important Stuff is simply amazing to me.  Tiffany is a fantastic character, and the Nac Mac Feegles are sheer genius.

As a result, it's hard to find much to say about The Wee Free Men besides enthusiastic words.  So I'll keep this short and participate in the discussion that should happen at Kristen's blog today.



Looking around, I saw that the Jim Henson Company announced it would be making a Wee Free Men film, which sounds like a great idea, but that was all from 2016 and there doesn't seem to have been much news since then, so I guess I won't hold my breath.


So many different covers!  Here are just a few.











Comments

  1. curlygeek04March 9, 2019 at 7:46 AM

    I love the Tiffany Aching series! This is definitely an audiobook that would need a very good reader, so I'm glad you enjoyed it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanMarch 9, 2019 at 10:25 AM

    Yes, he's very good indeed. Maybe I should listen to the rest of the Tiffany books? Hm.

    ReplyDelete
  3. LoryMarch 9, 2019 at 10:41 AM

    I need to give this to my son to read. I hope it might hook him on PTerry.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Kristen M.March 9, 2019 at 10:58 PM

    I agree about this being his apex. I think his heart was in it perhaps more than in any other books. The emotional depth of the series as it gets to The Shepherd's Crown is wonderful and yet the books always remain funny and adventurous. I'm already a third through A Hat Full of Sky and having fun with the development of Tiffany's character even from the first book to the second. It's definitely hard to talk about this series without just gushing!

    ReplyDelete
  5. ed.pendragonMarch 10, 2019 at 4:25 AM

    I've recently finished the third of the series for the first time and can only say that Tiffany is up there with Dido Twite and Lyra Silvertongue as my all-time favourite young heroines. I thought the Wee Free Men would be irritating but they have as much heart as Miss Aching herself and compliment her perfectly.

    I agree with you, Jean, I just can't discuss any of this without gushing!

    ReplyDelete
  6. JeanMarch 10, 2019 at 1:21 PM

    Yep, gushing is impossible to avoid.

    Chris, the Feegles could SO easily have been irritating. I think in the hands of a lesser writer they would have been awful. Instead they are wonderful and some of my very favorites. I love everything about them.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more