*I did not find a suitable flair, this one was neutral enough
A few years back I was sitting in my bathtub and looking for the next book to read.
By that time I have already read classics like the Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy and many others.
I don’t remember how I came upon Terry Pratchett, it might have been some top fantasy list or a Reddit thread, but I do know I’ve seen the Discworld novels recommended several times before but always felt like, based on the cover art, they’d be rather shallow (yes, this was incorrect).
Well this time I decided to check them out and I downloaded a sample of Colour of magic.
And I still remember, very vividly, the moment I read this paragraph:
-
An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that A'Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.
-
and positively burst out laughing!
And I said to myself, yes, I think I have found something to read for the next few years.
It was not so straightforward though. I read and loved Colour of Magic. I had to push myself through the Light Fantastic and I liked a couple of next books ending somewhere around book 6.
Frankly, a lot of it went over my head. I’m not a native English speaker, and although my English was a certified C2 level even then, I just didn’t get a lot of what went on and sometimes had to even re read sentences to make them make sense for me. Of course, now I know Terry wrote layers of meaning into a single paragraph and included deep cultural and historical references - source of many famous Dammit Pterry! moments.
At that point I told myself there is no point in forcing it and I switched to reading other book. Among those I read in that break was the Song of Ice and Fire, all of Joe Abercrombie, the Guns of August and others.
Until I found myself in another reading slump and after some deliberation and especially after reading posts in this subreddit (it actually became my favourite subreddit of all time, you are all great people!) I have decided to give Discworld another shot, but selectively.
I read Small Gods and that was such an experience that I returned to the point where I stopped before, between Wyrd Sisters and Pyramids, and read chronologically from then on until I completed the series just this week and one of these books, Going Postal, have also become one of my absolute favourite stories of all time and had already been re-read and re-listened to many times since then, even between the other, chronological reads.
Somewhere in the middle of that run, I also decided I want to hear these books, not just read them. So I started listening to the audiobooks of the whole series from the start, and while the listening run is still ongoing (Currently listening to Wee Free Men), the reading run has completed and I decided to write this appreciation post, for review is something I would rather leave to others. I think I will now pick up another non fiction book as a palette cleanser and at some point in the future I will return to Terry’s other works.
I can say confidently now that Terry Pratchett was a genius, to paraphrase what Neil Gaiman wrote about Douglas Adams, not in the casual way people use it, but a real giant like an Albert Einstein of fantasy and I also must say, in contradiction to his own words, he did commit the crime of literature. And if somebody asks why or how was he genius, the answer is in the books - he wrote about dwarfs, trolls, humans, witches and yes, even policemen, but mainly he wrote about them as people being people with all that comes with that. A true exploration of the human condition, in the most literary sense.
The experience of reading Pratchett, and I am not the first one to make this remark, is like this:
- hey, this is really acute observation about human nature
- oh, this is really deep insight into this fundamental social concept
- hey, this is really cool and rather unique fantasy element
- ah, this is a reference to an obscure medieval book
- oh, I always throught this thing is just author's invention, and 10 years later I realised it actually exists in the round world.
- hm, is he talking here about the Tibetan tradition or is he referring to this paper in physics published in the 70s?
- oh, this is a d-k joke
Thank you Pterry for making me laugh while teaching me to think better about what it means to be a human. Thank you, the people of this community, for acting as a guide into the World of the Disc.
The Turtle Moves!
