I never feel quite right about writing a book review of a book that I’d already read before, but sometimes I can bring myself to do it with a series. In this case, it’s a sub-series—the Moist von Lipwig books within Terry Pratchett’s greater Discworld series. I didn’t quite intend to, but wound up rereading all three of them. In reverse order, in fact, which really highlights the “didn’t quite intend to”—had I known that’s what I was doing, I probably would’ve done it in the proper order, but I read the last one and then went “I want a bit more of that,” read the second one, and thought “well, I might as well finish the set.”
It’s not a surprise to me that I love these books, that they’re some of my favorite in the whole series, that I come back to them fairly often. There’s a specific aspect to them that I love: the feeling of building something. Moist, and oh what a name, is a man who works only in words—something I can relate to, being a programmer—and yet these books are three different times that he used that to help build something real. Rebuild the post office, rebuild the banks, and then build the railway.
I never regret reading a Pratchett book. In your case, dear reader, I’d say to actually go from first to last, rather than mixing it all around: start with Going Postal.1
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