"Good Omens" + ("The Long Ships")

This feels like a mostly Terry Pratchett book -- Neil Gaiman doesn't let people off that easily I don't think. The narrator must have had a ball doing all the voices.

• 'You've got to admit it's a bit of a pantomime, though,' said Crawly. 'I mean, pointing out the Tree and saying 'Don't Touch' in big letters. Not very subtle, is it?
• 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.' The thousands of motorists who daily fume their way around its serpentine lengths have the same effect as water on a prayer wheel, grinding out an endless fog of low-grade evil to pollute the metaphysical atmosphere for scores of miles around.
• One of the nice things about Time, Crowley always said, was that it was steadily taking him further away from the fourteenth century, the most bloody boring hundred years on God's, excuse his French, Earth.
• Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly it was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn't pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn't understand. They'd never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or valueadded tax. Or Manchester.
• But there was no getting out of it. You couldn't be a demon and have free will.
• Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness.
• People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.
• It meant that Crowley had been allowed to develop Manchester, while Aziraphale had a free hand in the whole of Shropshire. Crowley took Glasgow, Aziraphale had Edinburgh (neither claimed any responsibility for Milton Keynes,* but both reported it as a success).
• The ducks in St. James' Park are so used to being fed bread by secret agents meeting clandestinely that they have developed their own Pavlovian reaction. Put a St. James' Park duck in a laboratory cage and show it a picture of two men—one usually wearing a coat with a fur collar, the other something somber with a scarf—and it'll look up expectantly.
• 'Two,' said Crowley. 'Elgar and Liszt. That's all. We've got the rest. Beethoven, Brahms, all the Bachs, Mozart, the lot. Can you imagine eternity with Elgar?'
• And then there's the whales. Brain city, take it from me. Whole damn sea full of brains.'
• 'You're saying the child isn't evil of itself?' he said slowly.
  'Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality, waiting to be shaped,' said Crowley. He shrugged. 'Anyway, why're we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.'
• This was ridiculous. The last thing he needed now was to be killed. It would require all sorts of explanations. They didn't hand out new bodies just like that; they always wanted to know what you'd done with the old one. It was like trying to get a new pen from a particularly bloody-minded stationery department.
• This time the consideration was more thoughtful. The Them had reached that position where, as it were, the roller coaster of Life had almost completed the long haul to the top of the first big humpback of puberty so that they could just look down into the precipitous ride ahead, full of mystery, terror, and exciting curves.
• The suspect was now green to the waist.
  'It's just like a seesaw,' she said. 'Whee!'
  'I'm going to go home unless I can have a go,' muttered Brother Brian. 'Don't see why evil witches should have all the fun.'
  'It's not allowed for inquisitors to be tortured too,' said the Chief Inquisitor sternly, but without much real feeling.
• Shadwell had turned out to be about five feet high and wore clothes which, no matter what they actually were, always turned up even in your short-term memory as an old mackintosh. The old man may have had all his own teeth, but only because no one else could possibly have wanted them; just one of them, placed under the pillow, would have made the Tooth Fairy hand in its wand.
• And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.
• The rates of pay for witchfinders had last been set by Oliver Cromwell and never reviewed. Officers got a crown, and the General got a sovereign. It was just an honorarium, of course, because you got ninepence per witch found and first pick of their property.
• The small alien walked past the car.'CO2 level up 0.5 percent,' it rasped, giving him a meaningful look. 'You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?'
• Most psychic abilities are caused by a simple lack of temporal focus, and the mind of Agnes Nutter was so far adrift in Time that she was considered pretty mad even by the standards of seventeenth-century Lancashire, where mad prophetesses were a growth industry.
• You see, it's not enough to know what the future is—You have to know what it means. Agnes was like someone looking at a huge picture down a tiny little tube. She wrote down what seemed like good advice based on what she understood of the tiny little glimpses.
• She was sort of trying to look after us after she'd gone. That's the reason for the King's Lynn prophecy, we think. My father was visiting there at the time, so from Agnes's point of view, while he was unlikely to be struck by stray rounds from Dallas, there was a good chance he might be hit by a brick.'
• When most people said 'I'm psychic, you see,' they meant 'I have an over-active but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/talk to my budgie'; when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have.
• There is a tiny metal thing above it. The kraken stirs.
  And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance.
• Or… or maybe… yes, what would happen if he put the cassette in the car? He could play Hastur over and over again, until he turned into Freddie Mercury. No. He might be a bastard, but you could only go so far.
• 'Woss the matter with you?' asked Big Ted, irritably. 'Go on. Press 'D.' Elvis Presley died in 1976.'
  I DON'T CARE WHAT IT SAYS, said the tall biker in the helmet, I NEVER LAID A FINGER ON HIM.
• Pollution removed his helmet and shook out his long white hair. He had taken over when Pestilence, muttering about penicillin, had retired in 1936. If only the old boy had known what opportunities the future had held…
• FOR AS LONG AS THERE IS ONE DEMON LEFT IN HELL, CROWLEY, YOU WILL WISH YOU HAD BEEN CREATED MORTAL.
• He stopped, his ears listening in horror to the words his mouth was speaking. The Them were backing away.
  Dog put his paws over his head.
  Adam's face looked like an impersonation of the collapse of empire.
• Late frost burns the bloom. / Would a fool not let the belt restraint the body?
  The cherry blossom tumbles from the highest tree. / One needs more petrol.

================================
Only 9% into Frans G. Bengtsson's Viking tale.

• The Dioscuri of nineteenth-century realism, factual precision and mundane detail, set sail on The Long Ships with nationalism, medievalism, and exoticism for shipmates, brandishing a banner of nineteenth-century romance; but among the heroic crew mustered by Frans Bengtsson in his only work of fiction is an irony as harsh and forgiving as anything in Dickens, a wit and skepticism worthy of Stendhal, an epic Tolstoyan sense of the anti-epic, and the Herculean narrative drive, mighty and nimble, of Alexandre Dumas.
• This was in 989. In the following spring another vital battle was fought in Sweden, on Fyris Plain before Uppsala, when the dreaded Styrbjörn, the exiled nephew of King Erik of Sweden, sought to win his uncle’s kingdom, but was killed by a chance spear in the first moments of the fight.
• soon it became impossible for the Göings to obtain, as hitherto, a yoke of three-year-old oxen for a sturdy priest without giving a measure of salt or cloth into the bargain. So feeling increased against the shaven men in the border country.
• the old gods fell into disuse,
• even the monasteries and churches, that had previously been easy to plunder, had now built high stone towers to which the priests betook themselves and from which they could not be driven by fire or by force of arms.
• it had long been the custom for slave-traders to gather in Cork from all the corners of the world to bid for the captives whom the Vikings brought there;
• whereas now you heard talk of cramps from men in the prime of life who were apparently quite willing to die, unashamedly, on their backs in straw, like cows.
• there was, at that time, a shortage of good mail-smiths in the land, most of them having migrated to England or to the Jarl at Rouen, where their work was better paid.
• this was Björn Olofsson, commonly called Styrbjörn, the banished nephew of King Erik of Uppsala, who seldom sought refuge from storm and never from battle, and whom few men willingly encountered at sea.
• in Ireland, there were, as was well known, no less than a hundred and sixty kings, some great, some small, but all of whom possessed much gold and many fine women, and whose soldiers fought wearing only linen garments,
• Her cry reached them as a thin sound across the water, but she stood there long after they had ceased to hear her. In this wise Orm, the son of Toste, who later came to be known as Red Orm or Orm the Far-Traveled, set forth on his first voyage.
• Berse the Wise agreed, and said that men without luck had the hardest burden of all to bear. “For man can triumph over man, and weapon over weapon; against the gods we can pit sacrifice, and against witchcraft, contrary magic; but against bad luck no man has anything to oppose.”
• leaped to his feet with a great cry and a joyful countenance and cast himself full length on the deck before Krok and put a tuft of his beard into his mouth and chewed it;
• León, and they knew roughly where it lay: on their right hand between the land of the Franks and that of the Cordoban Caliph; perhaps five days' good sailing southwards from the Breton cape,
• Men who sailed from Norway to Iceland, said Berse, had a more difficult task, for they had no land in whose lee to shelter, but only the open sea, stretching away for ever on either bow.
• pointed his finger across the sea at the sunrise. He sought among the words he knew and said that those were the red wings of the morning far out in the sea, and that his God was there. Orm replied that his God appeared to him to be the sort of divinity who was best kept at a respectable distance.