Cannonball Read 11

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Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

December 7, 2017 by borisanne 2 Comments

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

I cannot emphasize enough how much of a treat Good Omens is. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett will also tell you how much of a treat it is. They will tell you in their introduction and their afterward how much they wrote it for the love of it and also how much people are obsessed with it. And whether the bragging is a little classless or a lot charming – spoiler alert: it’s definitely both – it’s also one hundred perfectly warranted. Good Omens knocks it out of the park for both style and content.

This book was written in 1990, before Gaiman or Pratchett were much of a “thing,” though Pratchett was definitely on the map with “Discworld” by then. Reading it, having mainlined a bunch of Gaiman by now but never have gone so far back as Good Omens, I can only imagine how much of a shot across the bow this book must have seemed at the time. It is unabashedly strong and right. The way in which these two seamlessly collaborated to tell a very true-to-tone, completely whimsical, deeply sacriligious but probably not technically blasphemous story that is adventuresome and tense is *chefkissinghisfingersdelicious*.

Obviously, I’m a fan. I’m trying not to spoil anything for you. Then again, just go read The Bible and also look around at humankind. Gaiman and Pratchett really just filled in the blanks.

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Filed Under: Fantasy, Fiction, Religion Tagged With: #Gaiman, adam young, anathema device, angels, anges nutter, anti-christ, antichrist, apocalypse, aziraphale, cbr9, crawly, crowley, Death, demons, earth, end of days, famine, fantasy, Fiction, four horsemen, Heaven, hell, horsemen of the apocalypse, Neil Gaiman, newton pulsifer, nutter, pollution, pratchett, prophecies, Religion, Terry Pratchett, Urban Fantasy, war, witch, witches, witchfinder army

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12/7/2017 borisanne's CBR9 Review No:39 |
Rating:
| Tags: #Gaiman, adam young, anathema device, angels, anges nutter, anti-christ, antichrist, apocalypse, aziraphale, cbr9, crawly, crowley, Death, demons, earth, end of days, famine, fantasy, Fiction, four horsemen, Heaven, hell, horsemen of the apocalypse, Neil Gaiman, newton pulsifer, nutter, pollution, pratchett, prophecies, Religion, Terry Pratchett, Urban Fantasy, war, witch, witches, witchfinder army | Category: Fantasy, Fiction, Religion | 2 Comments

borisanne

She reads. She sort of writes. She hikes with the dog. She watches TV. She cooks and bakes like a champ.

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Comments

  1. Malin says

    December 9, 2017 at 8:40 am

    My husband is reading me and the bump a little bit of Good Omens every night (it’s important to get children into the classics early) and it’s such a treat. While some of the aspects of the book feel a bit dated now, it’s still mostly all solid gold and I really hope the Amazon series does it justice.

    Reply
    • borisanne says

      December 9, 2017 at 6:58 pm

      This is the greatest. Lucky baby!!! Fingers crossed for the series… the casting is amazing. Eeek!!

      Reply

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One of CBR11's #CannonBookClubs will be about Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett to coincide with the BBC Miniseries.
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