Discworld 28: The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents

[timepiececlock]

I was in the grocery store parking lot yesterday listening to my audiobook when Maurice died and I had a tear gather at the corner of my eye.

I've never gotten teared up over a cat before, in any book. But I just came to love Maurice and his ethical dilemmas and his catness warring with his conscience. I felt so sorry for him in the end here, how the rat king obliterated his mind and then he died of his wounds while carrying out Dangerous Beans's body.

But then it was all okay! Because he was only on his fifth life. And cats have nine, right? ::claps::

The only other time a Discworld scene made me close to tearing up was in the fifth book Sourcery, which wasn't even one of my favorites, when Rincewind sees the UU library has been destroyed and he's searching through the ashes for the Librarian or, at worst, the Librarian's body. His only real friend.

I'm thinking of buying this book (Amazing Maurice) and giving it to my second cousin, who's nine, I think. I hope she'll love it too.


Now I can move onto Nightwatch which I have in paperback form, so I won't be listening to it in audiobook.

That's a good thing, because the last couple audiobooks were narrated by Stephen Briggs, whereas the first 23 books were narrated by Nigel Planer. I liked Nigel Planer better, especially with the Watch characters.

Comments

[fani.livejournal.com]

This was the book that made me think "Daymmmmn , this guy's magic!"

I cried at the end of Thief of Time, giggling madly by the end of The Truth and clapping out lou at the end of Going Postal (read it 15 times, and no, the magic hasn't gone yet)

[muffytaj.livejournal.com]

I remember when I first read that book when I was a kid, and I threw the book across the room when I read that passage.

It took my mum ages to convince me that it was all ok and that he "got better". So you might want to be there for your second cousin when she reads it :p

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

Wow. I did notice while I was reading that many of the morally ambiguous things Pratchett writes were still there in the book, even though it was a kids book, and that some of the stuff a kid might find upsetting. But I think it depends on what you like to read... I was reading Jurassic Park and Congo when I was 9-10, and this is less scary than that. Probably more emotionally involving and better written, though.

Hmmmm.... she lives about 500 miles North. But she's a bright kid, she'll probably pick it back up again.

How old were you?

[muffytaj.livejournal.com]

Oh I would have been around 10 at the time, and the thought of a cat dying like that (or at all) was utterly devastating to my little self. I could happily read people dying, but animals dying was right out.

I was a strange child...

No so weird.

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

I would cry when dogs died in movies, way more than people.

Re: No so weird.

[muffytaj.livejournal.com]

It's strange that, I still get more affected by animals dying in films and such than humans. It might simply be that we see humans dying a lot more in films than animals: after all, action films tend to have a high human body count but no animals, and so we're more desensitised to human death in stories. Or it might be the innocence of the animal that gets to me (the same as many people will react more strongly when a child dies in a film/book).

There's a thesis in here somewhere, but I'm too tired to find it *grins*