Book Beginnings & the Friday 56: Good Omens

Book Beginnings is hosted by Rose City Reader. The weekly post goes up every Thursday and bloggers can add their links all week.

I had better get this up before the link-up ends! I didn't post on Friday, but I started this book on Saturday.

The Friday 56 is hosted by Freda's Voice

My current audiobook is Good Omens: The Nice & Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch  by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman. This is one of my favorite funny books. (There are some gaps in my humor reading, though I still haven't read a word of Wodehouse, for example, but I will. Someday.)





Here is the beginning:

It was a nice day.
All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn't been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first one was on its way, and it was going to be a big one.

GoodReads synopsis:
"According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner.

So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture.

And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist . . ." 

Also... I don't usually quote author biographies in the back of the book, but the one for Good Omens is pretty funny. Here is a bit from the Pratchett bio (written before his death in 2015):

... In his search for a quiet life he got a job as a Press Officer with the Central Electricity Generating Board just after Three Mile Island, which shows his unerring sense of timing. Now a full-time writer, he lives in Wiltshire with his wife and a daughter. He likes people to buy him banana daiquiris (he knows people don’t read author biographies, but feels this might be worth a try).

My 2006 paperback copy has an update in the bio: ... He has drunk enough banana daiquiris, thank you. It's G & Ts from now on.  

56% in the audiobook (I am using the print book as a reference, but the 56% is from the audio download in the Libby app):

"Anyway there isn't any evil here. That's what I don't understand. There's just love."
"Sorry?" said Newt.
She gave him a helpless look. "It's hard to describe it," she said. "Something or someone loves this place. Loves every inch of it so powerfully that it shields and protects it. A deep down, huge, fierce love. How can anything bad start here? How can the end of the world start in a place like this? It's a kid’s paradise." She smiled weakly. 

Not a comedic bit, but not really a spoiler either, or rather, it only reveals something about the plot when you get to that part of the book and know the context.