2 Down, 50 to Go

Going to read more this year, and it starts with being a little bit behind right away, naturally. But here’s the first two books-of-the-week.

1. Snuff by Terry Pratchett

Another Vimes story from Pratchett’s Discworld universe, this one involving questions of who the law applies to and how it gets applied. I’m generally taken with Pratchett’s approach to law and crime and law enforcement, though I sometimes wonder how many different ways he can tackleit with Vimes, et al. This is a pretty decent addition to the oeuvre, though not quite as affecting, I think, as Thud!, for instance.

2. Patriot Games by Tom Clancy

I reread this periodically, mostly because I’m curious as to how Clancy did it, back in the day, before character and plot bloat took over his books. It was also kind of interesting, juxtaposed against Snuff which also tackled some of the questions of extralegal “justice” that are one of the major throughlines of Patriot Games. I’m still…bemused with how detached and analytical Clancy could be in addressing the response to terrorism from his pre-9/11 position in this book; at the end of the book he’s holding his newborn son in his hands, telling him that his father is not a murderer… and in the most recent books, that very son would grow up to be just the sort of extralegal murderer that Clancy seemed to be weighing against in Patriot Games. I think the irony would be more heartbreaking if Clancy himself seemed more conscious of it.

Either way, though, Patriot Games is a well-crafted (and, I suspect, well-edited) book that I’m continually trying to learn from.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.