Just finished Thud, the new Discworld book. More later when I've thought about it a while, and possibly re-read it, but the book provided me with my usual Pratchett experience. He's one of the few writers who can still make me forget the smoke and mirrors and creaking ropes of story and simply dive into my suspended disbelief. I highly recommend it, if Pratchett is to your taste. Though it wouldn't make a good first Discworld book for a newcomer -- far too much context would be missing from the story.

However...it's a US first edition hardback from HarperCollins, and it's full of weird typos. After a while I finally decided the text had been scanned at some point, because many of the typos looked a lot more like OCR errors than like any possible typesetting (or authorial typing) errors. For example, "Woeworld" for "Uberwald", where you could see how |Ub| might scan as |Wo| (three vertical elements followed by a round thing), and |ald| might scan as |orld| if their was schmutz on the scanner glass or something. Which seems annoyingly weird for a hardback from one of the biggest-selling authors in the field. Doesn't HarperCollins have copyeditors? Proofreaders? Did anyone *look* at the US page proofs? Heck, a ten-year-old would have caught most of these typos. It's embarassing.