Soul Music – Terry Pratchett (Audiobook)

Read by Nigel Planer

Listened to: August 2013 (at age 35)

If you haven’t read it:

This is the Discworld novel #16 or something.  It’s part of the Death cycle, so you might as well read Mort (#4) first. It’s not strictly necessary, but Mort is a good book, too.  It also features the Wizards, and that takes us all the way back to Equal Rites (#3), also a good book.

From the back of the book (from lspace.org):

Other children got given xylophones. Susan just had to ask her grandfather to take his vest off.
Yes. There's a Death in the family.
It's hard to grow up normally when Grandfather rides a white horse and wields a scythe - especially when you have to take over the family business, and everyone mistakes you for the Tooth Fairy.
And especially when you have to face the new and addictive music that has entered the Discworld.
It's Lawless. It changes people.
It's called Music with Rocks In.
It's got a beat and you can dance to it, but ...
It's alive.
And it won't fade away.

My Very Brief Reactions (spoilers!)

Overall: 

This was basically a romp around the idea of the rock band, and on the surface was a bit of framework to hang some truly wretched puns upon.  There were many very good points, there were tiresome running jokes (I’m looking at you, Klatchian Foreign Legion), there were characters both sympathetic and less so, and there was more depth than I was able to pay attention to listening to the audiobook.  It may have helped to have more of a background into some of the big rock’n’roll stories of before my time – not just the music, but also the stories of the artists themselves – and I’m really not sure what to make of the Death storyline.  It felt a bit redundant.  It may have been necessary to introduce Susan for following books.  I guess I’ll see when I get there.

Overall, I didn’t feel like it was a particularly strong entry in the Discworld saga, about on the level of Moving Pictures.  But it was certainly enjoyable, and there were many wonderful moments.

Rating: 3

Audiobook reader: 

Good.  Effective use of different voices and a very appropriate reading style to the material.  As with the past few, I missed out on a bunch of visual puns (some of which I caught later from the Annotated Pratchett Files )

Other Opinions:

This was a heavily-reviewed book, it seems.  Here are some of the ones I most enjoyed reading:

SF Reviews.net

Measured review – similar to my read.  A bit disappointed.

Sandstorm Reviews

I haven’t been on Sandstorm for a while.  She writes wonderful reviews, but stopped several years ago.  Also mildly disappointed.

Thardrandian Thoughts  

Similarly disappointed, but liked the Death storyline, didn’t like the rock’n’roll storyline.  Interesting.

…mild disappointment across the board.