Moist von Lipwig

I'm a reaaaally big fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. It spans almost 40 books at this point, but I love that you can hop in at basically any point. I happen to get most of the books from the library, and I love that as I go along when I see mentions of other characters I get to be like "ooh! ooh! I know them!".

I also really like that while the entire series parodies a whole bunch of topics, it's still original. It's not like the Scary Movie franchise or other comparable parodies where people just yank scenes from well-known books/movies, mash them all together, throw in some curse words and yell "look! It's funny!"

There are many recurring characters, loosely compiled into their affiliations either with the country witches (who do more psychology than witchcraft) or the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork, who can be no less slimy than the people they arrest.

I just finished a story arc about a relatively new character, Moist von Lipwig; a con artist who is hung under his alias, but the (benevolent?) dictator Vetinari uses a trap door to keep him alive. In both Going Postal and Making Money Moist is commissioned to take over defunct and poorly running government offices - the Post Office and Royal Bank, respectively. Moist is different from the other characters we've met, with a taste for adrenaline and flair for the ridiculous, and all sorts of shenanigans ensue.

I would say more, but I don't want to give spoilers :)

It's been great reading about all of your guys' favorite books this week!

Books I like

I had a little difficulty picking out the books I wanted to talk about for this but I narrowed it down to three. I was going to mention books like the Harry Potter series and The Hunger Games, I think they're great books but I don't think need any badly worded praise from me.

Looking For Alaska, John Green. I was going to try and stay away from John's books because it seem rather fangirly to mention his books in a blog which is basically about the community based around him but Looking For Alaska is my all time favourite book. I can honestly open this book at any page and start reading it and enjoy it as much as I had the first time I read it. Words cannot describe the love I have for this book.

Going bovine, Libba Bray. This is a fantastic book from start to finish. It's about a sixteen year old guy called Cameron who finds out he has a weird disease and is going to die. He ends up on a road trip with a dwarf and garden gnome. It's a really interesting book about living and dying. It also has one of the greatest opening sentences ever, "The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died at Disney World."

The Second Coming, John Niven. I'm actually in the middle of reading this but so far it is fantastic. As the title suggests it is about the second coming of Jesus, basically the story is God goes on holiday, comes back to see the world the way it is and how messed up it is and decides to send Jesus back to fix things and spread the word. What I've read so far is really good but I think it's a rather controversial book due to the language used in it and the pot smoking in heaven. Still I think it's a great book, I know it's not published in the US but if you can get it online you should totally read it.