Review: Pyramids (Discworld Book 7 of 53ish)
This book is a more-or-less standalone novel in the Discworld universe. The chart shows it as the start of the Ancient Civilizations subseries, but it only has a dotted line (minor connection) to other books.
I enjoyed this, but not as much as some of the previous Discworld books. The protagonist is Teppic, the only son of the king of a small kingdom. This kingdom has stayed relatively unchanged for about 7000 years and its citizens rarely venture beyond its borders. They value ritual and tradition and they’re terrified of change. One of those traditions includes mummifying their kings and building pyramids to place them in. Pyramids are apparently very tricky things…
Before the book begins, Teppic decides to go off to assassin’s school. The book starts with Teppic taking his final exam, with brief flashbacks about how he got there. The early part, where Teppic was still at the school, was the part I enjoyed the most. After that, my interest in the story fluctuated. I enjoyed it over-all, but it was easy to put the book down. Teppic annoyed me sometimes, because I thought he handled some things too passively. However, the other characters were far worse. The Pratchett-style humor is still there in full force, though, and I laughed out loud several times.
The next Discworld book on my list is Guards! Guards!, the first book in the Watch subseries. I’m looking forward to that one, but first I’m going to resume the Discworld break I was taking before The Sheep Look Up sent me scrambling for something light and fluffy.
This book did have one awesome thing going for it, though. Camels! I love camels because they have funny faces, and Discworld’s version of camels are pretty funny too. I wanted to read more about the camels. I now present you with the first picture I’ve ever included in a review post, because camels inspire such things. How can anybody look at a face like this and not want to smile? (This is an English camel. I took a picture of him during a vacation to England almost seven years ago.)