Books

This week I finished A Stroke of the Pen by Pratchett and Excession by Banks, I then started Inversions also by Banks as the next part of my Culture re read. I haven't read some of the books in that series for several decades so its been great to revisit them. I have been doing that a lot the last couple of years as last year I reread all of Pterrys books and earlier this year I reread all of Tolkiens books.

Excession is good but it struggles to keep the competing story elements tied together in a deep and meaningful way, they just sort of exist next to each other in the same part of space time. I prefer others in the series and its one of my least favorite Culture books. I prefer Inversions, its one of his more subtle books, almost a non culture, culture book, as if Iain Banks wrote it not Iain M. Banks.

A Stroke of the Pen really is for only hardcore PTerry fans who are completionists who want to see how he developed as a writer as it collects stories found that he published under pseudonym in local newspapers. I found it quite short., but obviously they can only publish what was already there so its hardly a serious complaint. I enjoyed reading it and appreciated the huge amount of effort went into the detective work finding these lost stories from the local newspaper archives. One strictly for fans of PTerry.