Making Money by Terry Pratchett
book, review, discworld
This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later with next to no spell/grammar checking.
5/5 stars
The title of this book is an obvious, but still wonderful pun.
Moist Von Lipwig, the Postmaster General who managed to bring the Ankh-Morpork post back from the ruin, has been tasked with a new job. He is to head the Royal Bank as well as the Royal Mint, tasked literally with creating money.
The book starts rather slow, the topic of banking being less enticing than that of the post office (which is strange — I wouldn’t have considered post offices particularly fascinating), but it quickly picks up the pace. There’s mystery, intrigue, lawyers, hidden identities and taking a complete piss out of the entire banking industry.
In addition to being a fantasy novel, it gets pretty deep into the philosophy of money, worth of gold, currency backing, tradition, bank runs and a shared trust in what are literally just fancy pieces of paper the society has decided have value.
The book has also had me roaring with laughter — a thing less common and important in the later Discworlds but still always welcome.
