December Days 18: things I believe in (balsamandash)

[alexseanchai]

"All right," said Susan, "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need ... fantasies to make life bearable."

No. Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers?"

Yes. As practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

Yes. Justice. Duty. Mercy. That sort of thing.

"They're not the same at all!"

Really? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act, like there was some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged:

"Yes. But people have got to believe that or what's the point?"

My point exactly.

nb: never actually read Hogfather. Or more than a few pages of any Pratchett besides Good Omens. Planning to change that, though; I've got a hold on a library copy of Hogfather. (Also thinking about reading Discworld for my tentatively planned fiction-book-a-week project in 2015. Forty books published per Wiki; that should last me most of the year.)

Comments

[kaberett]

I love this quotation so much.

[alexseanchai]

:)

[kaberett]

like I wrote an entire piece of coursework basically on it (pulling in some quotations from other bits of the series) for GCSE Eng Lit; I got an A*.

[alexseanchai]

Shiny!

[davidgillon]

Sounds good to me ;)

Still remember a friend grabbing me at uni and telling me there was a new book by some unknown called Pratchett that I really needed to read, he was right. And what was great was he kept getting better with every book.

You don't need to read in publication order, and the stories are all independent novels, but it would probably help to read the various sub-series (Guards, Witches) in their individual order - the wiki Discworld article will tell you all you need to know.

[alexseanchai]

I find publication order is typically best reading order, at least for first reading? Like, Narnia books, You Must Start With LWW. Putting Magician's Nephew first just ruins the initial experience of LWW. Subsequent experiences, chronological order or suggested reading order works.

Also, :)

[davidgillon]

You can't go wrong with publication order, but it isn't absolutely mandatory for all of Discworld, just for some books wrt others. Essentially they're written consecutively, there are no prequels or timeline oddities, but adjacent books in publishing order may be set so far apart in physical space that social changes from one haven't yet had a chance to spread to the society where the next takes place - for instance all the social changes from the Guards books down in the big city of Ankh-Morpork don't have much effect on the Witches books which take place in the backwater Ramtop mountains (though the Witches do get down to AM from time to time in order to do some social changing of their own).

[alexseanchai]

Nod, nod.

[crystalpyramid]

Also: The one problem with publication order for Discworld is that the first book is much less good than subsequent books. I've never actually been able to get through The Color of Magic, and I let that deter me from reading the whole series for a while. So don't worry too much if you don't enjoy the first one. Most of the rest are awesome.

[davidgillon]

Yeah, there's a distinct improvement through the early books. Guards! Guards! is possibly where he really hit his stride.

And as various people have noted, it took him a long while to be able to write young women as well as he could everyone else. Tansy Rayner Roberts has a really good set of essays on 'Pratchett's Women'.

[raze]

... ooh. I might need to read this.

[alexseanchai]

:)

[silveradept]

Still a good sequence, and acted well by the voice of DEATH in the television adaptation.

[alexseanchai]

:)

[everbright]

I LOVE how the cardinal virtue of humans as a race is that 'fake it till you make it' WORKS.

[alexseanchai]

Also the cardinal vice...but yes.