This post is the gathering place to share about your adventures reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books this summer. Continue reading “Summer in Discworld: REVIEWS”
Tag: Discworld
Summer in Discworld: Terry Pratchett Reading Challenge
Have you ever considered spending the summer with witches and wizards, dwarfs and trolls, a vampire photographer or even a walking piece of Luggage? Care to visit a Post Office literally overflowing with mail, or to stroll beside the river Ankh? (Actually, I wouldn’t recommend that last one during the warmer months; it’s a bit, shall we say, odorous!)
Come explore the Discworld (a disc carried on the back of four elephants, on top of a turtle) and add some hilarity to your summer by joining us for a Terry Pratchett Reading Challenge!
The “Challenge”
Pratchett is consistently responsible for the funniest books I read each year, and I wanted to share the laughs. This is a challenge only in the loose sense–all you have to do to participate is read any book from Pratchett’s sprawling 40-book Discworld series between June 1st and August 31st, and tell us about it. I’m putting up a separate post where you can link to your reviews or share your thoughts in a comment.
Feel free grab the image above if you’d like to share about the challenge on your blog. Maybe some of your friends will want to join in too. If you need suggestions on where to begin reading, check out my earlier post on favorite Discworld books, or explore the comments to see what other people are planning.
For those new to Discworld, there are three rules to keep in mind:
1) You don’t have to read the books in order.
2) Don’t start at the beginning (the first few are funny, but weaker than later books).
3) Don’t read them somewhere where it will be awkward to laugh out loud!
Group Read
I’m also holding a Group Read of Going Postal during July (not a requirement of the challenge, just a fun bonus). Going Postal won the group read poll, and is a great place for people to start out with Discworld.
Chapter One begins: “They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.”
The plot: conman and criminal Moist von Lipwig inexplicably survives a hanging, only to find the Patrician offering him a goverment job, as Ankh-Morpork’s new Postmaster General. Moist uncertainly accepts, becoming master of a Post Office overflowing with old mail (some of which seems to be talking to him), leading a troop of mad postmen. And then there’s the business competition with the telegraph service to think about…
I’ve divided the book roughly into quarters to cover four weeks. I’ll send out discussion questions early each week, and reviews should be planned for the following Tuesday. Here’s the schedule:
Week 1, from “The Nine Thousand Year Prologue” through “Chapter 4: A Sign” – reviews on July 10
Week 2, from “Chapter 5: Lost in the Post” through “Chapter 7: Tomb of Words” – reviews on July 17
Week 3, from “Chapter 7A: Post Haste” through “Chapter 11: Mission Statement” – reviews on July 24
Week 4, from “Chapter 12: The Woodpecker” to the end! – reviews on July 31
Book Your Ticket to Discworld
Sign up for the “challenge” with MisterLinky below, and feel free to share in a comment what you’re thinking about reading. Let me know also if you’d like to join the group read.
I look forward to visiting Discworld with you!
A Pratchett Proposal
In my recent posts about Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (here and here), I noticed a smattering of comments along the lines of “I’d really like to read more/start reading Discworld.” Now, I’m always up for reading more Discworld myself, so I thought…what if we made it a group effort? I’ve also been thinking for a while that there’s going to be a hole in my book-life when the Once Upon a Time challenge ends June 20th, and this could be the perfect solution!
So here’s the proposal: how about spending part of the summer with Terry Pratchett? I’m thinking this would run June 1st to August 31st (so you could even do a two-for-one in June, with the OUaT challenge). It would be totally low pressure, low requirement, high fun…all you have to do is read something from Discworld (and if you really want to read a different Pratchett book, that’s cool too) and then tell us about it. If you have a blog and want to share a review, great–if not, you could just leave a comment (I’ll set up a post for that).
I thought we could do a group-read if there was interest in a particular book. And of course you’re welcome to dive in absolutely anywhere you want with Discworld (though I don’t recommend starting with any of the first three).
This post is really just to gauge interest, and see if enough people want to jump in for it to make sense to hold a Pratchett Experience (that “challenge” word is far too intimidating for such fun books!) So…if you’re interested, leave a comment and let me know! Vote in the poll below if you’d like to get into a group read. And if it turns out some people are interested in reading Pratchett this summer, I’ll post something official at the beginning of June.
Gender Equality in Discworld
So far, I’ve seen Terry Pratchett be hysterically funny while tackling subjects like racial tension, politically-motivated war, business competition, and murder investigations. In my most recent Discworld read, Equal Rites, he took on gender equality–and if not hysterically funny, he was at the least quite amusing.
This is a new one for me but not for him, as it’s actually the third book in the Discworld series. Unfortunately, it shows. It took a few books for Pratchett to quite work out Discworld, and there seems to be universal agreement that the first couple are simply not as funny. It’s true for the third one too–it’s funny, but something’s off. Timing, style, character…I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s just not AS funny. Don’t get me wrong here–that still makes it one of the funniest books I’ve read this year. It pales only in comparison to the rest of the series.
I read this one because it’s the first book focusing on the Witches, one of the groups of major recurring characters within Discworld (along with the Wizards, the City Guard, and Death). I read Maskerade, another Witches book, long before I read any other Discworld (it’s that Phantom connection), and I hadn’t read any Witches books since, so I couldn’t quite put Maskerade in context. This helped a bit, though there’s much more to read.
As to the actual plot…a dying wizard passes his power on to what he thinks is a newborn boy–but turns out to be a girl. This is a problem because girls never become wizards. When Esk gets older, strange occurrences start happening around her–as when she turns her brother into a frog. Her family sends her to the local witch, Granny Weatherwax, who starts teaching her witchcraft. But Esk still has all this wizard power hovering around her, and eventually they set off for Unseen University, where all the wizards are trained, to see what can be done about a girl wizard.
There are certainly funny moments. Granny is an excellent character, although she’s not quite there yet. She’s a major character in Maskerade too, and she’s funnier then–but she’s funny here. There’s chaos and there’s mayhem and there’s at least a bit of commentary on gender rights.
It’s a good book–but I only recommend it if you’re really interested in reading as much Discworld as possible. If you want a fantasy novel about gender equality, read Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet. If you want to read one book in Discworld, read Going Postal (and if you want to read a few more, check out my post here). As for me, I’ve got my eye on another Witches novel, Lords and Ladies, which I’ve been told is a retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream…
Author’s Site: http://www.terrypratchett.co.uk/
Other reviews:
Confessions of an English Literature Eater
Eyrie
Cubilone’s Dimension
Yours?
Favorites Friday: Discworld
The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett really is a world unto itself. It’s a sprawling, chaotic hilarious tumult of a series, with forty-odd more and less connected books. The biggest problem is where to begin, and that did put me off for a while…until a friend finally handed me one and told me to start. I’ve read 18 since then (I think–I swear I counted my list five times and it kept coming out different, which is actually very appropriate for Discworld). I found out it doesn’t really matter where you start, so if you enjoy humorous fantasy with a satirical bent, I highly recommend jumping in wherever you like.
But some places are perhaps better to start than others, and some books are more hysterically hilarious than others…so I thought I’d share a few favorites, to give you some ideas. Don’t start with the first book in the series, The Colour of Magic; it’s fine, but there seems to be universal agreement that it’s not one of the best.
Maskerade is the first Discworld book I ever read, sort of. I did read it first, but I came at it solely as a Phantom of the Opera retelling, had no context to put it in, and haven’t reread it (or enough of the books about the same characters) since reading others to really get it into my head as part of the larger whole. But technically it was the first, and still a favorite. There’s a masked madman who’s terrorizing the Ankh-Morpork Opera House with, among other things, little notes where he writes down maniacal laughter (as in “Ahahahahaha!!!!! Yrs, The Opera Ghost”). This book also has one of my all-time favorite lines. Death, a recurring character, appears to a recently deceased man, and tells him he’s going to be a rat in his next life. The character says, “But I don’t believe in reincarnation!” To which Death replies… “But reincarnation believes in you.” Actually, he says it in all capital letters, because he’s Death.
I began my proper reading of Discworld with The City Guard books. There are eight books focused on Guard Captain Sam Vimes and his crew of more and less competent watchmen. Guards! Guards! is the first, if you want to start there. One of my favorites is Jingo, which satirizes the political jockeying around wars. Vimes eventually prevents war by arresting both opposing armies for disturbing the peace. Also, Nobby Nobbs gets in touch with his feminine side–which, trust me, says it all if you know the character, and is impossible to explain if you don’t.
My other favorite City Guard book is Thud! This one is about racial tension–and it’s hysterically funny. No, really. In this case, the two races are trolls and dwarfs, and Vimes has to prevent their ancient feud from exploding all over his city. My favorite parts, though, are kind of sidenotes. There’s a famous artist whose papers are almost impossible to decipher, because some of them were quite odd…even odder than “you are not a chicken.” Also, there’s Vimes’ adorable practice of reading Where’s My Cow? to his son every night promptly at six o’clock, and he never misses. Even if his men have to declare a state of city-wide emergency to get him home on time. There’s a companion picture book of Where’s My Cow? which is simply adorably good fun.
Going Postal is actually my usual recommendation to people of where to start. I wrote a review earlier, so suffice to say here that it’s about a petty criminal who survives the gallows and is given a chance to become Ankh-Morpork’s new Postmaster. The Post Office hasn’t functioned in twenty years and is literally filled with undelivered mail. And I do mean literally.
The Truth is another good starting place, another fairly independent one. This one satirizes journalism, and features a vampire photographer. The light from the flash turns him into dust every time he takes a picture. But it’s okay, he has it rigged so he turns back again.
If this post is a little disjointed and incomprehensible, that’s just the nature of the series. Not really disjointed and incomprehensible, but random and complex and marvelous. You know you want to understand all my half-comprehensible jokes and carefully veiled references…so you ought to read the series!
Tales of the Marvelous 