Soul Music

One of the best early/mid Discworld books, which introduces one of the best characters in the series, Susan Sto Helit, aka Susan DEATH. The overall plot asks the question of what would happen if ‘music with rocks in’ (i.e. Rock and Roll) came to Discworld.

This one is a pretty good Discworld starter book. (Discworld is an awesome series where you probably shouldn’t start with the first books. The series has various connected subseries, such as the Guard books, the Wizard/Rincewind books, the Witches books, and the Death books. This is the third DEATH book, but it is also the start of the Susan Death arc within the Death books.

Soul music is another discworld novel where Terry Pratchett explores and pokes fun at a broad theme. In this case it’s rock music and let’s face it rock music is a valid target. It tells the story of Imp y Celyn who’s a bard. He meets a troll and a dwarf and forms a band. They play “music with rocks in it” thanks to the help of a not entirely benign mythical guitar. On the way Death goes missing and his granddaughter Susan has to take over. What could possibly go wrong. Well if CMOT Dibbler is involved then you can bet that everything goes wrong with hilarious consequences. Half of the fun of this book is spotting obscure references to bands and songs. How about the felonious monk and the surreptitious fabric? Some of them are quite hard to spot. If you like Terry Pratchett then this is a great book anyway and since it’s before he settled into principal character mode has a sense of fun and novelty that is missing in some of the more establishment Ankh-Morpork books. Rock music had it coming and Pratchett delivers agin in spades of laughter and irony. A great read.

This was the first DW novel I ever read. It got me hooked on all the rest. I’ve re-read it several times, and still find new, hilarious musical and pop culture references each time. Stuff I didn’t “get” the first time around suddenly hits, and I’m the weirdo laughing out loud at a book.
The Kindle version would be as great as the original, but the footnotes Sir Terry is known for aren’t always the easiest to get to. I have to hit the tiny asterisk just right to get it to work. No biggie, really. I still love that I can take all my favorite comfort books with me wherever I go.

While not every Discworld adventure is a masterpiece so far, in the ten or so Ive read, each contains, at the very least, a smattering of gold and precious paragraphs that never cease to make me laugh, really hard. They are the literary diamonds of comedy, the emeralds of satire, the treasure of a mind whose insight and understanding was universal and now immortal. Hes probably playing backgammon with death now, over a glass off something quite old and rare.

The book itself is fantastic. However, there’s serious formatting and typography problems. There’s a whole section in the middle where the pages are out of order, and this book (and A LOT of other Kindle books) is FULL of typos apparently caused by no one checking the text recognition software when they scanned the book to digital. I bought this book years ago and I’m still waiting on a corrected update.