Terry Pratchett
 

Any Terry Pratchett Fans on Tilted?

Yah, I think he just had a new one hit the shelves here in the states. Going Postal I think.

There's a signed first edition at Powell's (local bookstore in Oregon) and I want it!

Good Omens (w/Neil Gaiman) is one of my favorite books, and I love Discworld.

http://www.co.uk.lspace.org/fandom/s...gehogsong.html

The Hedgehog song! Yay!

I think Pratchett is a great satirist, and he's not afraid to kick around a few big ideas while having fun. And while some satire is essentially soulless, Pratchett's books usually have a great deal of heart along with some well-delineated, flawed characters that we can care about. The majority of his books are worth a second and third read, just to appreciate everything that's going on above and below the surface. Among his best, to my taste, are Guards! Guards!, Small Gods, Hogfather, and Night Watch, and I also had a great good time with Pyramids, Men at Arms, the Fifth Elephant, The Truth, The Last Hero, Feet of Clay, and others. Not as fond of most of the books about Rincewald or the witches, but they're decent reads. My wife thinks Lords and Ladies is brilliant. And Discworld is a great creation: very well-drawn, but never constrained.

Yeah, the local big independent bookstore had half-a-dozen autographed copies of Going Postal at full price, and they've nearly sold out. Meanwhile, the Borders down the street has a dozen non-autographed copies at discount price, and they're moving more slowly. Makes me wonder: did Pratchett arrange for ONLY independent bookstores to get the autographed copies? I know he cares about books and bookstores; maybe this is his way of helping the independents to survive.

I'm afraid I put Going Postal on reserve at the local library rather than buying it; even the Borders price is too much for a one-day read. So I'll have to wait a month or two, but I'll eventually read it for free.

<i>Small Gods</i> is something like my 5th favorite book of all time (Behind Dune, Snow Crash, Watership Down, and Lord of Light). All of his stuff is funny, some of it laugh-to-the-point-of-tears- funny, but that one he hit straight out of the park.

I have to admit that I wasnt looking forward to reading Small Gods in college (the assigned argumentative essay on it didnt help either) but the book was very funny. It used humor and stereotypes to point out differences and similarities between Discworld and our own. The God Om and his outbursts were some of the funniest things i have read.

I always shed a tear at the end of Small Gods when Brutha gives a hand to Vorbis to help him across. I'm getting glassy eyed thinking about it. (It's exactly the same with the end of Lord of Light and Watership Down.)

The <i>Colour of Magic</i>, if far more farcical, is also a superior book. Sort of an absurdist fable, which is to say that the moral is "everybody dies in the end."

Good Omens is one of the best books I have ever read. To this day, I leave tapes I do not want by artists I don't like in the glove box of my car in hopes of ending up with the complete works of Queen. ;)

I, too, love Good Omens, having read much of both Gaiman and Pratchett. While I wouldn't go as far as to say my favorite book, it does nonetheless have an awesome quality to it that makes me go back and read it every once in a while. Pratchett's Discworld series also has some great characters (Sweeper :thumbsup: ) and storylines as well, though I think Gaiman added a lot to Good Omens that is missing from Pratchett's other works. (Don't hate me for saying it just 'cause we're on a Terry Pratchett thread... I can't even rightly place what it is that I think is missing.)