The one Faith has doesn't fit the description that was in that book... at least, as far as I can tell. Lemme see if I can dig it up online, rather than find it in the book, which is all the way over on those shelves I'm looking at while touch-typing... ...well, L-space says this:
Anoia appears as a thin woman, wrapped in a sheet, and smoking a cigarette that emits flame and sparks, possibly a holdover from her previous position as a volcano goddess.
Honestly I always factored into it that somewhere along the lines before he became patrician he worked in a high-pay low effort beauracrat job until he could put the pins in place to steal the Patrician-ship and as he got control of the job he realised that he needed to be active, thus lost the weight.
I realise there's more to it than that given some of the backstory Terry later added in, but thats a simple enough band-aid for me without going too far into it.
Wait, when and where was Vetinari referred to as being overweight?
Every description of him that I can think of, even in Men At Arms, has him as being pretty skinny. I don't ever remember, and am having trouble imaging, him being a fat guy.
I don't think Lord Vetinari was in any those books?
If he was, he wasn't mentioned by name. He was just called "The Patrician" If I recall correctly. So the patrician could have been Lord Snapcase or Lord Winder. Not certain though.
Oh, well I take anything said in the first two/three to be fairly loose, canonically. Like the thing with the dragons in Colour of Magic.
I always go with the later books if anything contradicts or doesn't fit with the first couple because you can tell Terry didn't have everything figured out in the first two and probably didn't expect having to write so many more.
So I'm going with the skinny Vetinari who was educated by the Assassin's Guild and probably didn't do much of anything else between then and becoming Patrician.
In The Colour of Magic, Rincewind is brought before "the Patrician" but it is not clear whether this Patrician is Vetinari or his predecessor, Mad Lord Snapcase, or possibly even Homicidal Lord Winder, although the description of this Patrician does not seem to tally with that of Vetinari, as the Patrician in question is, for example, described as obese – a trait his two predecessors did possess, but which he lacks.
Pratchett has stated on Usenet that the Patrician in this case is indeed Vetinari, and that he simply lost weight due to the stress of his job.[1] Upon being pressed, he admitted that the only real difference is that he has become a better writer since that time.
I'm going to go with the explanation that Pratchett should have gone with, that it wasn't Havelock or, if it was, that he made a mistake in his description.
Ah yes, I never realised that they differed so much, but I had always imagined her as per that first description.
As for the Vetinari stuff; hmm... *finds this all very interesting and thinks she should re-read the earlier books to check details*
However, while we're on the subject, what about combining the two most popular ideas from the poll before and painting a Vetinari dragon? Just a thought...
Despite my love of the series, I refuse to camp outside my local bookstore waiting for the next book nor am I willing to dress up. Unless I can get the full monstrous regiment together.
When you can pre-order online and have a signed copy delivered straight to your house, there's really no reason to even go to a bookstore in the first place, really.
Ironically I think my hair's far too long to be any of the Monstrous Regiment, except maybe post-scalp swap Igorina.
Most my shopping is done online these days, but don't you miss going to a bookstore and finding a fascinating book that normally you'd never find especially now because Amazon doesn't add it to your "recommended for you" list?
You refuse to dress up? And here you're in a thread where about 40% of the population will be in Discworld costume at some point in August due to attending the convention There's been talk of wizards, Feegles and Luggages. Plus something tells me Feyd will bring his armour again
Most my shopping is done online these days, but don't you miss going to a bookstore and finding a fascinating book that normally you'd never find especially now because Amazon doesn't add it to your "recommended for you" list?
I miss video rental shops for that same reason - "what is this film? It looks terrible - let's find out"... the recommendations just tends to be easily identified titles, and reinforce an idea that people only like one thing. You bought a martial arts films? Well, from now on we'll make sure you never have the chance to experience any other genre unless you go out and do so for yourself first, and then come tell us about it...
The best (and worst) books I ever read were from a second hand bookshop next door to me, where the low prices meant the covers alone could decide if I gave something a try or not, regardless of whether it was like anything I'd ever read before.
You know what? This is how I got my first Discworld books... Hooray for Josh Kirby covers, and hooray for not being pigeon-holed by something as un-yielding as a "recommended for you" engine.
(Those books, by the way - Pyramids, Guards! Guards, Small Gods, Lords and Ladies, Men At Arms, Soul Music, Interesting Times, Maskerade, and Feet of Clay. Someone, somewhere had got rid of a lot of good books for some reason)
I bought a watch off amazon in August, I still get emails telling me about great deals on watches.
The only reason someone why anyone would want to sell discworld books that comes to mind is that they have some sort of addiction to narcotics or mills and boone novels that have made them lose their senses in order to fund such terrible habits.
Strange. Most preference-matching algorithms are a little bit more sophisticated than that. They generally recognise that most humans don't buy a watch or a television more than once every 3-4 years and look for the patterns in what you've bought to figure out what else you might like. For example, the popular internet image of an Amazon page for a combat knife with "people who bought this item also bought:" and then it lists the DVD sets for seasons 1&2 of Dexter.
Eric Ilustrated version: I have to say I read the paperback version first, realised there was a Josh Kirby picture book edition and bought a copy of that too.
That's one I haven't got (yet); I have the paperback, thought it rather random compared to the other books in the series, and like you then realised there was an illustrated version out there.
So I'm writing a biographical profile of Terry for my coursework.
Only I need a few decent anecdotes to go into some depth around, I've read quite a few interesting stories online from interviews and stories of conventions and the like, but nothing really in depth or in any detail.
Stop by the library and see if they can get hold of a copy of Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature by Andrew Butler and Farah Mendlesohn. I can't remember how many anecdotes it may have, but it should be a good piece to reference.
... I'm not just naming this as Farah is a lecturer at the university where I studied...
