Joao Trindade reviewed The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett (Discworld, #2)
Review of 'The Light Fantastic' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Complete non-sense, extremely hilarious
mass market paperback, 256 pages
French language
Published Dec. 28, 2010 by Pocket, POCKET.
The Light Fantastic is a comic fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett, the second of the Discworld series. It was published on 2 June 1986, the first printing being of 1,034 copies. The title, taken from a poem by John Milton, in which it refers to dancing lightly with extravagance. The events of the novel are a direct continuation of those in the preceding book, The Colour of Magic.
Complete non-sense, extremely hilarious
Of the two I've read so far of this series, they are giving The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a very good run for its money (although I must say I am partial to Hitchhiker's a TINY bit more, but this is certainly VERY close).
This is the second Discworld book and the second one I've read. I'm officially hooked. The writing is better here: more jokes (puns, one-liners, silly observations), focused plotting, filled out characters, and even a few poignant lines that lead me to believe there may be more to Pratchett than just a catalog of yuks.
I'll definitely be reading the next one in the series.
I enjoyed this second Discworld novel marginally more than the first part (Colour of Magic). The humour is there in all its gory, no idiom will stay unscathed and no legend uprooted. Darkness is not the opposite of light, it's just absence of light. Opposite of light is called (appropriately): Light Fantastic.
2nd book of 131,636,128 in the Discworld series, The Light Fantastic maintains a similar humor style to the first one, but does a much better job of weaving a coherent, compelling narrative.
Instead of characters wandering around randomly for the sake of wacky hijinx, there's now an overarching story, which causes many wacky hijinx to ensue.
A marked improvement over the first, and I look forward to more of the series.
The Light Fantastic was my introduction to Discworld, and I will never forget it. It lays out the Discworld as a humorous landscape, though it is less developed than more recent Discworld novels.