Here are the questions we used to whet our appetite.
- What preconceived notions of good and evil do we know?
- Do you think "God" has a divine plan?
- Do you think Adam/Warlock would have been different if they were nurtured by different folks?
- How does the humor work with the subject matter?
- What do you think is the main idea behind the novel? Do you think it works?
- Do you think that Aziraphale and Crowley are distinctly either good or evil? For that matter, do you think any character is either good or evil? Why or why not?
- Do you think Adam would have ended up differently had he not been lost? How?
Most of us liked this book
(one of us did not)
Got going for it…
British humor
Monte Python style
Funny
Interesting idea
Pushes the nature vs.
nurture question
Dog the dog was interesting
and funny
The witch, Agnes Nutter, was
a cool character
Some great quotes, like “The
men in the room suddenly realized that they did not want to know her better.
She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was
beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close. And as she held her sword, she smiled like a knife.”
Made it difficult…
British humor
Monte Python style
Many characters and names
Each character, even the
devil’s nuns, had its own separate story line, and they also crossed over to
the main plot
It was hard to keep track of
present and past activities in the timeline of events
Study Guide and Plot Summary is here: http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-good-omens/
"Good Omens is the story of an angel and a demon who are both trying to do their jobs that are part of the Great Plan. Although Aziraphale and Crowley are adversaries by nature and profession, their relationship develops into a friendship merely because of the time spent together over thousands of years. In this unlikely pairing, compromises are made between the two of them so that they can both appear to be accomplishing their missions without overcoming the other too much. When the birth of the Antichrist occurs, they agree to work together and try to see if their influences on the child have any effect. By the time they locate the correct child, it is almost too late as Armageddon is about to begin. Events unfold and the world is saved. At the end, Aziraphale and Crowley wonder if their involvement had any effect."
A good blog review here: http://theblogwasbetter.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/january-2013-discussion-good-omens/
Some quotes below and more here http://fish.cx/quotes/good_omens.txt and here: http://www.lspace.org/books/pqf/good-omens.html
"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."
"Anyway, why're we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that." 2
"I told you. On his eleventh birthday. At three o'clock in the afternoon. It'll sort of home in on him. He's supposed to name it himself...
"Well, Hell was worse, of course, by definition. But Crowley remembered what heaven was like, and it had quite a few things in common with Hell. You couldn't get a decent drink in either of them, for a start. And the boredom you got in Heaven was almost as bad as the excitement you got in Hell."
"Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole."
"In fact, very few people on the face of the planet know that the very shape of the M25 forms the sigil *odegra* in the language of the Black Priesthood of Ancient Mu, and means 'Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds'."
"If Adam had been in full possesion of his powers in those days, the Young's Christmas would have been spoiled by the discovery of a dead fat man upside down in their central-heating duct."
"... the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. (This is not actually true. The Road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen. On weekends many of the younger demons go ice-skating down it.)"
"I mean, if it takes a red sky at night to delight a sailor, what does it take to amuse the man who operates the computers on a supertanker? Or is it shepherds who are delighted at night? I can never remember."
"So computers are the tools of the Devil? thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of *somebody*, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn't him."
"Death straightened up. He appeared to be listening intently. It was anyone's guess what he listened with."
"'We seem to have survived,' he said. 'Just imagine how terrible it might have been if we'd been at all competent.'"
"Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide."
"Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A."
"Jaime had never realised that trees made a sound when they grew, and no-one else had realised it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves of twenty-four hours from peak to peak. Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is /vrooom/."
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