Men at Arms

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Compact discs.
Unabridged.
Read by Nigel Planer.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Summary / Annotation
Fiction Profile
Excerpt
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

my beloved diskworld submitted by ferdoble on August 11, 2011, 3:52pm To describe Terry Pratchett’s books is a difficult thing to do. The disc world series is in a word fantastic. Terry Pratchett, would seem to use the disk world, to take any theme, or know story and then twist it in his own very humorous way. These are not always laugh out loud funny (sometimes they are), bur rather the sort of funny that just sort of lifts your spirits a little bit.

I will say that in some cases there isn’t always a really strong story, sometimes its just his characters moving through one of those twisted themes. I like them all, you may want to start with the Most Von Lipwig story line (“Going Postal” and then “making money”) as at least the first one has a really great story line.

I love to pepper my reading queue with these books to keep all those books that take themselves seriously fresh and interesting.

I recommend reading them ALL.

OR listening to them. The two main narrators of Terry Pratchett’s books are Stephen Briggs & Nigel Planer and they take Terry Pratchett’s phenomenal writing to a whole new level.

Funny but with a social message submitted by Jen Chapin-Smith on August 16, 2012, 2:33pm "Men at Arms" deals with the dangerous allure of violence and weapons but in a very subtle way. It also deals with the lust most people have for power despite the cost to their soul and what it takes to be better than that.
The novel follows a "gonne," the first and only firearm in Ankh-Morpork, which is an otherwise very technologically advanced city. The police use swords and crossbows instead. The gonne has a mind of its own, tricking its handler into killing others in a quest for power, in a way that parallels the ring in "The Lord of the Rings" series.
Sir Terry Pratchett has written 39 Discworld novels. British audiences rate his books highly and list them as among their all-time favorites, alongside the Narnia chronicles. I highly recommend them to as they are highly entertaining and (usually) funny despite the grim content at times. I recommend reading "Guards! Guards!" first to get to know Discworld, Ankh-Morkpork politics and its City Watch first in order to have the right background to understand "Men at Arms."

Love it! submitted by slugwhisperer on July 12, 2013, 5:34pm Love it!

discworld submitted by unknown on August 10, 2013, 10:49pm This is the Discworld novel wherein Captain Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork's Night Watch retires and gets married, the Night Watch itself becomes an equal species organization, and Gaspode the Talking Dog falls in love with new recruit, Angua, the werewolf. She has just joined the Night Watch under the Equal Species Act, along with Detritus the Troll and Cuddy the Dwarf.

No wonder Sam, who is a bit of a male chauvinist speciesist is going to retire.

Not since Stephen King's "It" have clowns gotten such bad press as in "Men at Arms." They seem to be the saddest creatures on Discworld. One of them, Beano is murdered and ends up playing 'Knock Knock - Who's There?' with Death, who is trying to develop a sense of humor.

Humor will never be the strong suite of a hooded, seven-foot skeleton with glowing blue eyes, but Death does get in one inadvertently funny line. He tells Beano to think of his newly deceased state as being 'DIMENSIONALLY DISADVANTAGED.'

Meanwhile back in the world of the living and undead, Captain Sam Vimes and his command investigate the circumstances of Beano's death. Sam is also under orders from his wife-to-be to find a missing swamp dragon, which is likely to explode if it comes under stress.

When a large hole is blown in the headquarters of the Assassin's Guild, Sam has a pretty good notion of what caused the explosion. What he really wants to know is whether this latest calamity has something to do the Beano's death. After all, the Assassins are right next door to the Guild of Fools and Clowns.

What he does not yet know is that mad genius, Leonard of Quirm's deadliest invention has fallen into the hands of a rabid monarchist who will do everything in his power to restore Ankh-Morpork's rightful king---and that king is a member of his own Night Watch.