A review by bluejayreads
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

4.5

This book was difficult to get through and frequently hard to follow, and that’s entirely not the book’s fault. One of the drawbacks of reading books as audiobooks at work is that I am, in fact, at work and have to be doing other things. The past two weeks at work, I was given two different projects (a large customer order that four other people were also working on and training a new person) that required me to do a lot of coordinating with people. It’s hard to both listen to a book and talk to someone about something entirely different at the same time. So I listened to Hogfather in fits and starts, a few minutes here and a few minutes there, chopping the story up into smaller bits that did not at all help my enjoyment or comprehension of the story. 

Which really sucked, because for as much as I’ve struggled with the previous Death books, this one didn’t have a lot of the issues I had with the others so far. Yeah, Death was busy doing things that weren’t his job, but he hadn’t completely stopped doing his own job, and he wasn’t doing other things on a whim. Those other things did actually need to get done. And sure, in the end nothing really changed, but in this story that’s a good thing, as the main point was less making things happen then preventing bad things from happening. 
As seems to be the case in the Death series, Death doesn’t get a whole lot of page time. Although there were a lot of other characters doing their own stuff throughtout this book as well. 

  • There were Death and Albert trying to get the hang of delivering toys on Hogswatch night (and making some distinct social commentary about class and wealth disparity in the process).
  • There was an absolutely off his rocker assassin doing … I’m not entirely sure what. Tooth fairies were involved. Somewhere in my disjointed reading experience I missed exactly what he was up to.
  • There was Susan, who I actually quite enjoy now that she’s an adult. She is completely Fed Up With This Bullshit, and she may not be able to escape the supernatural nonsense but she can and will hit it with a fire poker. I hope she gets to be a bigger player in future Death books because adult Susan is fantastic.
  • Then there were the wizards. The bounce in and out of the other characters’ stories, and they’re also doing their own stuff. There’s a bit of musing about the nature of belief and sentience – and also a couple computer programmer jokes – with Hex (Ponder Stibbons’ computer-like invention), and a very weird subplot about Archchancellor Ridcully’s new bathroom. I’ll be honest, I do not at all understand the point or purpose of the bathroom plot.

It’s entirely a coincidence that I picked up the holiday-themed Discworld book around the holidays, but it was fun. There were some musings on the nature of holidays and their traditions, what it means to believe and how belief affects the world, and how different the world looks through the eyes of children, plus mentions of holiday gift-giving as an illustration of wealth inequality and the ancient and significantly-less-cuddly roots of most treasured traditions. And if you wanted to call this book Death and his Granddaughter Susan Save (Discworld’s Version of) Christmas, that would also be valid.
 
Even reading it in fits and starts, making it unnecessarily confusing and at times hard to follow, this is probably my favorite Death book so far. I can only imagine how much more I would have liked it if I’d been able to read it straight through like normal. I’m really hoping the rest of the Death sub-series is like this, because I had a remarkably good time with this book.
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