Tagged: terry pratchett
Day 25 – A character whom you can relate to the most
This post is part of a month-long series of pre-dated posts running while I am on holiday. Feel free to comment, I’ll get back to you when I return!
Please note that any “reviews” I write here are simply my own opinion and that I am not doing any objective, informative reviews for this challenge. If there are any spoilers in a post, I will indicate it at the top.
I draw the book covers straight from Goodreads and you can click on the images to go to the book’s page on there.
Tiffany Aching, the main character of one of the subseries inside Discworld.
Tiffany Aching is nine years old at the start of the first book about her and she has decided that she wants to be a witch when she grows up. Tiffany has the abilities First Sight and Second Thoughts. First Sight, unlike second sight, is quite rare and allows one to see what is really there, not what your mind tells you ought to be there. Second Thoughts are thoughts about your first thoughts. Later in the novel, Tiffany finds out that she also has Third Thoughts (thoughts that watches the way that she thinks about thinking) and possibly even more Thoughts.
Tiffany is the kind of person who reads a fairy-tale and then starts to question the motives of the characters. She wonders whether the handsome prince was really that handsome, or if the people simply described him that way because he was a prince. She wonders about the princess who was the described to be “as beautiful as the day”, because winter days aren’t very pretty and rather drab, compared to, say, a spring day when all the plants are renewed and blossoming.
“The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you have no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch. If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about “a handsome prince”… was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called handsome? As for “a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long”… well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories don’t want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told…”
- The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett
Tiffany is the kind of person who goes and looks up words that she does not know in the dictionary.
Tiffany is described as (I’m paraphrasing here) “the person at the party who sits in the corner with a very small drink, unable to join in the party spirit, because she has a little piece inside of her that will not melt and flow with the rest”.
That last paragraph… that is basically how I spend my life. I can’t join in. There is a part of me that thinks too much and questions everything and that part will not let me abandon myself and join in whatever is going on.
It is the same part of me that struggles to really care about people and feel for people. In the last few years, I seem to have ended up at quite a few funerals. I don’t know why there are so many funerals in the family. Anyway, at all of the funerals, I have ended up simply standing there. I couldn’t join in. Everyone was crying and hugging each other and getting on with the normal business of a funeral, but something was stopping me from doing the same. I go completely numb inside and all that I can do is stand there, watching myself think. The same happens at parties, which is why I avoid the things. It’s anyway just a nuisance to me, so why should I go?
In The Wee Free Men, one of the things that Tiffany is accused of is that she didn’t cry when her grandmother died. It bothers her and she wonders why she couldn’t cry. I didn’t cry when my grandmother died either. I couldn’t: something was stopping me. My mother had dropped me off at extra lessons and when I came out of the school and walked to the car, the call had just come through. All I could do was awkwardly stand there… I didn’t know what to say or do. There was nothing that seemed natural to me to do in such a situation: not cry or say something sympathetic, which is not something that I am good at anyhow. I may have been a lot older than Tiffany when it happened to her (she was seven and I was only just seventeen), but I still identified with the way that she felt.
Like Tiffany, I tend to question everything. I’ve always wondered about the useless princesses in the fairy-tales. I’ve always wondered about the sweeping statements that they tend to make. I don’t like them and I don’t like stories that want to prevent people thinking for themselves, which is also something that Tiffany objects to. It may be unusual, but it is just the way that my mind works.
“Yes! I’m me! I am careful and logical and I look up things I don’t understand! When I hear people use the wrong words, I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I think! And I always have a piece of string! That’s the kind of person I am!”
- Tiffany, The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett.
Tiffany is actually the character that I mentioned when I was writing about my favourite female character (the one that I said I would write about later). I love how self-assertive she is. I love how much she thinks. I love how she is armed only with a frying pan and Diseases of the Sheep (a book that belonged to her grandmother). It came quite slowly, how I realised how much I identify with her, but once I realised it, the connection was clear and she promptly became my favourite female Discworld character.
“Another world is colliding with this one,” said the toad. “All the monsters are coming back.”
“Why?” said Tiffany.
“There’s no one to stop them.”
There was silence for a moment.
Then Tiffany said, “There’s me.”
Tomorrow’s post is about a book that changed my opinion about something.
Day 15 – Favourite male character: Part 2
This post is part of a month-long series of pre-dated posts running while I am on holiday. Feel free to comment, I’ll get back to you when I return!
Please note that any “reviews” I write here are simply my own opinion and that I am not doing any objective, informative reviews for this challenge. If there are any spoilers in a post, I will indicate it at the top.
I draw the book covers straight from Goodreads and you can click on the images to go to the book’s page on there.
I was actually tempted to split this post into more than two. I’m already splitting the favourite female character-post as well, so this is getting a bit much. So I’ll just make a list to say who else I would have liked to write about and then leave it at that.
If I had the chance, I would also have liked to write about Pippin from LotR; Lord Veternari, Moist von Lipwig from Discworld; Artemis Fowl and Christopher Chant.
But today I am going to write about His Grace, His Excellency, The Duke of Ankh; Commander Sir Samuel Vimes from the Discworld-series and then leave it at that.
Sam Vimes is the main character of the Watch-subseries of Discworld-books. He started off as the captain of the Night Watch in the first book that features him and eventually progressed to Commander of the Watch.
He is an extremely conflicted character, but, thank goodness, not one given to angsting. That is simply the way he is: he has the conflicting traits of cynicism and idealism. He expects the worse of people, but would like to believe the best. This is caused by him being born “knurd”, which is the opposite of being drunk. His body does not produce any “natural alcohol” and this means that he cannot have any illusions about life. In Guards! Guards! he kept trying to correct this mental state, that was sending him into a depression, by drinking, but he always got the dose wrong and ended up getting drunk. Later, after getting married, he gave up all alcohol and became a teetotaller, though he was always testing himself by keeping drink in his bottom drawer. He always passed the test.
Vimes fears the darkness inside himself. He knows that everyone is born with good and bad inside them and he fears that one day, his will gain advantage and take him over. This led to him creating a guard in his mind that contains the darkness. Vimes is an extremely moral person, someone who will never take a bribe and is always insistent that he has never killed anyone. Oh, there were victims of circumstance, but he never meant to. That is what counts, as he tells himself to keep his sanity.
His wife describes him as “not a gentleman, thank goodness, but a gentle man”. He is intensely, incredibly good, not because he’s written as a “good guy” and therefore everything he does must be right, but because he strives to be this way. Often, he ends up going into morally-uncertain waters, where the truth is basically the way you bend it, but he always strives to do the moral thing and to be fair.
Sam Vimes is a character you can learn a lot about as you follow his story, starting with Guards! Guards! and ending with Snuff. He changes somewhat as the story progresses, but mostly he is very stable and dependable. He can also teach you a lot about trying to be morally good in spite of everything that gets thrown at you and never losing sight of your good intentions.
Vimes has been a drunk and a hero, he turned into an ambassador and a preventer of wars. He started off hating nobility and social rank and with a touch of irony, became a noble himself through his marriage. That did not stop him from hating it and he became a reluctant class traitor.
Through all of it, the Vimes-character has remained mostly stable. He can be relied on to make a cynical remark at the least provocation and to never let go off his morals. He grows and is enriched by his marriage and the birth of his son, Young Sam, but he remains a character to be admired.
I love his character and I still think he is at his best in Thud! It is there where he refuses to give in to the darkness and commit murder that he stands the climax of his character development. There is something hard to describe about him at that moment, but I do know that it is this which makes him supreme as a character: it’s in the way he inspires others to also be supreme.
Tomorrow I will write about my favourite female character.
Day 13 – Your favourite writer
This post is part of a month-long series of pre-dated posts running while I am on holiday. Feel free to comment, I’ll get back to you when I return!
Please note that any “reviews” I write here are simply my own opinion and that I am not doing any objective, informative reviews for this challenge. If there are any spoilers in a post, I will indicate it at the top.
I draw the book covers straight from Goodreads and you can click on the images to go to the book’s page on there.
Oh dear, now I’m stuck again. So many choices I’m quite overwhelmed. I think Terry Pratchett (yes, I know, again) is probably my favourite living writer, but I read dead people too. So what should I add here as well? I absolutely love J.R.R. Tolkien’s style and all his works (as far as I’ve progressed so far). I adore Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries. And of course Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is not to be left out of this list either. So how can I weigh such a diverse bunch of authors up against each other, every one (perhaps excepting the last two) from a different genre and style? Personally, I think it would be very unfair to try to compare any of them, because they are just too different from each other to find any matching points for comparison.
Agatha Christie wasn’t called the Queen of Crime for nothing. There’s no one who can compete with her ability to twist a story on the last page and blindside every single reader. Who else would have thought of making the criminal pretend to be the victim and so attempt to escape suspicion? Who else could have created a character such as Hercule Poirot, who is just in a class of his own? (Actually, I’m a Miss Marple fan. 
)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle… well, no else created Sherlock Holmes. It is not the mysteries that make Conan Doyle’s stories, it is Holmes and Watson. Conan Doyle is not able to or does not want to keep the reader in the dark up to the last page in the same way that Agatha Christie does. In many of his stories I could see through the mystery before the end, which has never happened to me when reading Christie. The wonder lies in the way that Holmes tackles each case: his eccentricities and methods that you get to know so well after a couple of dozen of stories.
J.R.R. Tolkien is not any less deserving to be called the father of modern fantasy than Agatha Christie is to be called the Queen of Crime. To me, there is nothing to compare to the scope of Lord of the Rings, including the languages, mythology, songs, poems and appendices. He was an author with the ability to paint a picture in words: you can see it, smell it and feel it all around you. His charm lies not in his characters (which are still great), but in his imagined world: the landscapes, creatures and races, and history.
Sir Terry Pratchett… well, I don’t even what genre it is that he is king of. But I do know that no one can beat his wit. There have been more energetic authors (though I believe they are few and far between), there have been authors better at characterisation, but I have never before read an author that can make you laugh on every page like he does. And when you’re done laughing, he’ll make you cry from guilt, because you can suddenly recognise your own faults in the “bad guy” and suddenly you realise how presumptuous you are for judging him: you’re as bad as he is!
And of course… I think I’ll always admire J.K. Rowling‘s attentiveness to fine detail and her ability to give reasoning and a backstory to the most minor of characters.
I’m honestly still stuck, even after writing this. I don’t know who my favourite author is. Well, now you at least know my options, because I can get no further than this. To try to choose would just be… wrong…
Tomorrow’s post is about my favourite book by my favourite writer and will probably not be any more sensible than today’s was.
Day 08 – Most overrated book
This post is part of a month-long series of pre-dated posts running while I am on holiday. Feel free to comment, I’ll get back to you when I return!
Please note that any “reviews” I write here are simply my own opinion and that I am not doing any objective, informative reviews for this challenge. If there are any spoilers in a post, I will indicate it at the top.
I draw the book covers straight from Goodreads and you can click on the images to go to the book’s page on there.
Yes, I am certainly going to talk about a Discworld book again. Everyone who doesn’t want to kill me yet still with me? Right, here we go and hold on to your hats and also your judgement, because you may just want to kill me after you start reading if you’re not there yet.
The book that I consider overrated that I have chosen to talk about is Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. First I gush about this series, and then I choose another of this number to criticise? Yes. There are many, many books that I think are overrated. The Twilight-series is one of them. So is The Earthsea Quartet. So is Eragon. But I have a very specific reason for choosing Small Gods.
I don’t think it is a bad book. There are certainly some laugh-out-loud funny moments in there. I just love the description on the back:
In the beginning was the word. And the word was “Hey, you!” For Brutha the novice is the Chosen One. He wants peace and justice and brotherly love. He also wants the Inquisition to stop torturing him now, please…
There are several scenes where the Pratchett wit is at its very best. Though I was confused and lagging sometimes as I read the book, I still don’t think it is bad. Someone on Goodreads once commented on one of the Discworld-novels and said that there are no bad Discworld books. I fully agree with this person, and I would appropriate George Orwell’s quote to say this: all Discworld books are equally good, except that some are better than others. Small Gods is one of those I think are less good than others. Yet…
It was one of only two Pratchett books to reach the NPR top 100 fantasy and sci-fi list. The other one was Going Postal, which happens to be one of my favourites. I think that there are better Pratchett books that should have got on that list, not Small Gods. That is why I think it is overrated and I am probably being completely unfair towards this book at the moment.
When the NPR list (which I and many others consider to be very authoritative) came out, someone commented on this exact same issue that I experienced. It may have been on Twitter. This person mentioned that “problem” that there are only 2 out of 39 Discworld-novels on there, whilst Sir Terry Pratchett is one of today’s most popular writers with hundreds upon thousands of fans. So why did all these fans not vote for his books to get them on the list? Why did two such different novels of his reach the Top 100? They were low down on the list as well. This commentator thought they had the answer. It is because out of 39 novels and counting, so many different people have their different favourites, no one can exactly decide which novel to stand behind as fans and vote for. Therefore, so many widely different votes are cast that the power is diluted and none of the books end up with any achievements.
Maybe I am just annoyed that none of my favourite City Watch-books reached the famous list. Maybe this is just sour grapes that Small Gods did reach the list, which is why I started to think it was overrated. I honestly did not like it nearly as much as some of the others. Going Postal, Thud!, Carpe Jugulum and others I absolutely devoured. But not this one. Perhaps it is that classic case of the underdog getting the bone, because everyone’s attention is devoted to the big and popular, however in the end the underdog gets the votes, not because everyone likes it so much, but because they are fighting too much over the others that they end up voting for something that they do not particularly like, but do not particularly dislike either. That is the way that I feel about Small Gods anyway. (That was a quote that I stole from Pratchett himself and then adapted, by the way.)
Perhaps it is because Small Gods is almost standalone that I did not like it much. Perhaps it is because I did not read all the books that go ahead of it and then I had a gap in my knowledge to confuse me. I do like the interlocking nature of the other Discworld-novels, even though you can read them apart and out of order. I did read most of them apart and out of chronology. It is quite possible. Small Gods also parodies religion, which I generally do not have a problem with, because we have to be able to laugh at ourselves and obviously, I did find it funny, but it wasn’t there. Search me why.
Aaaaaand… tomorrow’s post is about a book that I thought I wouldn’t like but ended up loving.
Day 03 – Your favourite series
This post is part of a month-long series of pre-dated posts running while I am on holiday. Feel free to comment, I’ll get back to you when I return!
Please note that any “reviews” I write here are simply my own opinion and that I am not doing any objective, informative reviews for this challenge. If there are any spoilers in a post, I will indicate it at the top.
I draw the book covers straight from Goodreads and you can click on the images to go to the book’s page on there.
* A slightly outdated picture of my Discworld collection. *
My favourite series in the entire world is Discworld by Sir Terry Pratchett. I’m going here just on series, not trilogies or anything else that authors have invented by now. If I don’t we’ll be here till Tuesday. Another contender for this prestigious honour (hah!) was the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, but if I was ever forced to choose between the two, I would have to choose the Discworld. It’s longer and more all-encompassing for one thing and more interesting to talk about. Young Adult is not my favourite genre either, whereas satire is. My own writing is quite a lot of satire. In short, I love satire. But I still love Harry Potter, don’t worry. 
At 39 books and counting, the Discworld is one of the longest series that I have ever encountered. I haven’t read all of the books, but I’ve read just over half (23, I think). And I’ve read most of the later ones. It’s of the earlier ones that my knowledge kind of lacks. I dream of one day owning and having read the entire series. 
The series is all set on a flat world, a disc not unlike that believed in by the peoples of the Ancient World, that rests on the back of four giant elephants that in turn stands on the back of a giant turtle, Great A’Tuin, that swims through space. There used to be a fifth elephant, but it fell off. If you find yourself rolling your eyes and thinking that this is not possible, I suggest you stop reading right now. Discworld is all about moving borders, about asking “what if?” and “what is possible?”.
What do I love about Discworld? Well, it is funny, but it is more than that. On the back covers of the paperback editions, they always call it “very close to the knuckleduster” and I consider this a very good description of the character of the books. Which is probably why that quote is on most of the covers in the first place, silly. Pratchett does more than crack jokes and make characters do and say embarrassing things. That is simply comedy or farce. He does all this anyway, usually, but underneath all of that lies a piece of social commentary for all who cares to stop and notice it. Underneath a lot of the jokes lies a lot of pain. As I read the books, I often get the idea that Pratchett cares intensely about people. He cares about people in all of their shapes and forms. There does not seem to be not a character that he cannot redeem in some small way. Even if a character does intensely evil things, he has a way of providing a legitimate reason for that person’s behaviour. Even if you cannot possibly agree with that person’s viewpoint, the reasoning behind it redeems him or her in some small way. Pratchett does not approach a story simply from the viewpoint of the hero, but also from that of the villain. Why do people act in the way that they do? After all, all people think in their own minds that they are in the right.
The earlier Discworld books are mostly pure comedy. There are jokes that are actually funny, there are a lot of puns. But already he is starting to question things. Like, what happens when the hero of the fairy tale/fantasy ages? He cannot remain young and limber forever. He is also going to get arthritis and a bad back. He is also going to grow too weak to heft a sword and no one is going to believe him when he declares who he is/was, because they think he should be young forever. The normal fantasy staples never touch this kind of ground. You are not supposed to think beyond the happy ending. Pratchett always does.
In my opinion, the first hint we get of what Discworld is going to become is in the third book Equal Rites, which deals with discrimination on base of gender. However, the series is still in its baby shoes here. Quite a large part of the series will grow to deal with discrimination later. I think Pratchett has a thing for it, because he will touch sexual orientation, racism, classism and gender discrimination. He especially likes giving a voice to the marginalised and the voiceless.
As the series grows, we also get to see the growth of Pratchett’s invented world. At first, it is sketchy. The description that Pratchett uses of an unsolved crime in Thud! works really well here as well. He speaks of it as a jigsaw puzzle: there are some corners and pieces of the edge, but the rest is a whole lot of sky. We get live through the Discworld’s invention of newspapers, a telegram-like system, football, films, music, stamps, paper money… and so on. By the later books, the picture of the history (strongly resembling that of Earth), geography (also strangely resembling Earth) and social problems (also painfully familiar) is so intricate that Discworld feels real. I feel as though I know it, like I know my own world. I feel as if I can picture Ankh-Morpork, Pratchett’s famous city, street for street and that is not something that happens often.
However, my favourite part of Discworld remains the social commentary underneath all the jokes and satire of regular fantasy and fairy tales. Especially the way that Pratchett deals with racism lies very close to my heart. Actually, he calls it “speciesism”, because people on the Disc do not discriminate on the basis of skin colour, but on the basis of species. “Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.”* Humans, pixies (pictsies), gnomes, goblins, trolls, dwarves, vampires, werewolves and zombies all make an appearance and are dealt with an refreshingly different approach from most fantasy. However, nevermind what anyone is called or what shape they are, you can always recognise our own world and its situations underneath it.
And that is the greatest glory of the Discworld: because it is familiar, laughter becomes a weapon. If that is not the goal of satire, I don’t know what is. If books and stories cannot point out wrongs and criticise, I don’t know what is going to become of society.
Check back tomorrow for my fave book of my favourite series! 
*From Witches Abroad.
