Feet of Clay

I'm glad I went ahead and bought the audio book version, so I can look forward to Nigel Planer reading me to sleep as I revisit this in the near future. Like the other City Watch books, it calls for re-reading both because of the liberally sprinkled jokes and wordplay (parsing the delights from the pure groaners is no doubt a matter of taste), but also because it's so obscure what's actually happening in the early chapters. I like going back and covering that ground again with full knowledge of the mystery.

As always, the characters are wonderful. I certainly hope to see more of Wee Mad Arthur, and Vetinari is his usual dry and calculating self in all the best ways. Once again, I'm missing Sybil, but you can't have everything.

17th May 2023


Feet clay follows the previous books in city watch series, asking readers to ponder about the same questions but with a twist. 

Discrimination is never a one way street. Politics and life are always that tad bit more complicated than one thinks. 

And all this was once again brilliantly woven together with the plot. Nothing overtaking the other. 

I will say, I love the beginning half of the book better than the later half, because it felt like a lot more happening then. 

Nevertheless, Vimes was a badass as usual.


Final Rating: 4.5/5

The City Watch of Ankh-Morpork is perplexed by a series of apparently inexplicable crimes, and Lord Vetinari is being slowly poisoned in some unidentifiable way.This is the first story to make real use of golems, although they were briefly mentioned in [b:Interesting Times 386368 Interesting Times (Discworld, #17; Rincewind, #5) Terry Pratchett https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1332112344l/386368.SY75.jpg 22431183].A female dwarf named Cheery Littlebottom is recruited into the Watch. She turns out to have some expertise in alchemy, although we'd probably call it chemistry.This is a fairly normal Discworld book about the City Watch, it's readable enough, but I don't find much of it actively enjoyable, and it's not memorable. I've read it repeatedly in the past but remembered little of it.Terry Pratchett evidently had a mission to persuade us that every thinking creature capable of communication is a person who deserves human rights and our full sympathy, however weird he/she/it may be. This is commendable, I suppose, but the repetition of this basic theme gets a little tiresome as he extends it to more and more different categories of creatures.Requesting our full sympathy for golems is rather a stretch: although golems appear to think in some way, and are capable of communication, it's not clear how they do any of this, not having brains to do it with. Their functioning remains unexplained.