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My reaction to the second Science of Discworld book is similar to my reaction to the first.  As before, the book alternates between short, fictional chapters that tell a Discworld story and longer chapters that discuss real-world (mostly) science. 

I enjoyed the fictional chapters.  The story was pretty entertaining, but it made up the smaller portion of the book.  The science parts, as with the first book, focus heavily on theory and origin topics whereas I would have preferred a heavier emphasis on more practical topics.  No doubt other people prefer it exactly the way it is.  There were definitely parts that interested me, and parts that made me chuckle, but there were also a lot of parts that induced yawns.

I also found it rather repetitive.  At least a couple things were repeated from the first book, and there were some themes that the authors went on about over and over.  Religion seems to be a particularly favorite topic.  Even though I agree with most of their points about religion, they really overdid it, especially when considering it was also discussed quite a bit in the first book.  To totally misuse a metaphor, I wanted them to stop preaching to the choir and spend more time on actual science.  And, for people who don’t belong to this particular choir, I can imagine they would be even more annoyed.  Trust me, repeating something over and over isn’t influential; it’s just irritating.

Skimming through some reviews over on Goodreads, I don’t see many people who had a similar reaction, so maybe it just boils down to me being the wrong audience for this set of books.  In any case, I plan to skip the last two science books.

In the header, I’ve changed my series book count from “53ish” to “50ish”.  This accounts for the two Science books I don’t plan to read, plus another book I had on my list that I realized isn’t actually a Discworld story and wasn’t written by Pratchett: Mrs. Bradshaw’s Handbook.  It didn’t look terribly interesting to me, so I scratched it off the list also.