Sorcery
The following post was written before I started this website, as such the notes consist of quotes and summary thoughts as I read the book. I’ve pulled the book club’s thoughts together at the top, along with the original score and the new tier ranking.
Final thoughts
So much happened, lots of interesting themes. The idea of powerful magic being too powerful, but also all of it was partly out of love and mainly out of hubris of one wizard.
The score is 4.08 Archchancellor’s Hats out of 5! (it’s starting to get silly….)
This is a B-tier Pterry book!
Favourite quotes
- And what would humans be without love? RARE
- Death always dreaded because he could never remember how the knight was supposed to move.
- the University carved for some inexplicable reason out of butter. He kept doing this every time there was a feast—butter swans, butter buildings, whole rancid greasy yellow menageries—and he enjoyed it so much no one had the heart to tell him to stop.
- Ge Fordge’s Compenydyum of Sex Majick is kept in a vat of ice in a room all by itself and there’s a strict rule that it can only be read by wizards who are over eighty and, if possible, dead.
- Rincewind stepped gingerly over the marching column. The Librarian jumped it. The Luggage, of course, followed them with a noise like someone tapdancing over a bag of potato chips.
- “There’s this long word, see, an old witch told me about it…can’t remember it…you wizards know about long words.” Rincewind thought about long words. “Marmalade?” he volunteered.
- The study of genetics on the Disc had failed at an early stage, when wizards tried the experimental crossing of such well known subjects as fruit flies and sweet peas. Unfortunately they didn’t quite grasp the fundamentals, and the resultant offspring—a sort of green bean thing that buzzed—led a short sad life before being eaten by a passing spider.
- It was said that everything in Ankh-Morpork was for sale except for the beer and the women, both of which one merely hired.
- If it pulls it off, however, Rincewind will have a serious philosophic idea. If it doesn’t, a nearby brick will have an important insight which it will be totally unequipped to deal with.
- “I heard, like what we see is only the tip of the whatever, you know, the thing that is mostly underwater—”
“Hippopotamus?”
“Alligator?”
“Ocean?” - The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts.
Thoughts during reading
- The whole idea of fee radical ideas hitting the wrong brains is very funny.
- The compliments from creosote are bonkers
- The idea that wizards naturally build towers like birds build nests???
- Being transported by being carried in the lamp you’re carrying. Reality hasn’t noticed yet.
- We thought death was bad? The others are even worse!!
- We met the ice giants, and they’re weirdly the embodiment of the heat death of the universe?
- Rincewind gone to the dungeon dimensions!
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