Posts Tagged ‘terry pratchett’

In the third book of the Discworld series, a dying wizard passes his staff onto a baby without first checking the gender. As it turns out, Eskarina is a girl. But there are no female wizards. What a to do.

I was a little disappointed in the content of the book I think, I was hoping for a in depth examination of gender roles and the struggle of a female wizard in an otherwise all male university. But most of the novel was about the journey to Unseen University rather than what happens when she gets there.

Never the less, it was an enjoyable read and featured plenty of Granny Weatherwax, which is always going to be a good thing.

I’ve just finished reading the second Discworld book, The Light Fantastic. I can’t work out whether I enjoyed it more or less than the first one.

I found it a bit slow to get doing – Rincewind and Twoflower’s adventures weren’t that interesting to me, but as the book went on, I found the tales of the wizards, and particularly the goings on of Ankh-Morpork drew me in to a to an incredibly imaginative world. I’m hoping this bodes well for the third book, which focuses on the wizards and the witches.

I also liked the increasing use of language tricks employed by Pratchett that made it an even cleverer text than the first.

I had only read one Terry Pratchett book since becoming an adult, which is now quite a long time ago, and I’ve never read any Discworld – so clearly that was something that needed fixing. While some people suggested the first in the series was far from the best, after careful consideration, I decided my OCD was too great not to start at the beginning, so The Colour of Magic it was.

The book starts by unloading a large amount of information at once, and I struggled to put everything together immediately, but as it went on, everything slotted into place and I found myself amerced in a wonderful world, packed with fantasy, magic and ever flowing adverbs.

In fact, I enjoyed it so much, I’ve already made a start on the second book in the series, The Light Fantastic.

The second book on my list was Terry Pratchett’s Nation. As I’m sure most of you are ware, Pratchett is an amazing writer, though I haven’t actually read one of his books since my childhood.

The novel follows the story of Mau, a child currently going through the initiation ceremony of his culture into becoming a man, only to find out that a great wave has wiped out his civilization. It is therefore placed on his shoulders to re-build The Nation.

Recently, Pratchett has made more of his status as a humanist, in no small part due to the number of religious scumbags who fight against the use of stem cell research in medical research to cure debilitating illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, of which Pratchett is suffering from. This is very evident in the novel – it’s not anti-religious, but it makes the point, very elegantly, that religion is a human creation.

I found it a bit low level, though I think it’s technically a children’s novel, but very enjoyable none the less.