Ever picked a... Terry Pratchett?
Terry Pratchett (or Pterry as he is known) is not an unknown author anymore - not that I’m suggesting he ever was unknown, but a few years ago, quite a few people seemed not to know what a delightful read his works were. Since then of course, Pterry has gained many new readers and some people are now even beginning to compare him to Tolkien or to compare and contrast Pterry’s Discworld against the popular Harry Potter series.

But I am not here to start a literary crusade against one author or another since I enjoy Tolkien, Rowling and Pratchett equally. I don’t think they can be compared since they are each in different realms even though they might all be broadly categorized as fantasy authors. My mission here is to share the sheer joy that any work by Pterry can bring you and get you to pick up a copy and try out a new author if you’ve been passing him by till now in your sojourns at the bookstore or your library.

I first encountered a Terry Pratchett over seven years ago when I was browsing through the books at Vijitha Yapa Bookshop. What caught my attention was the colourful and unusual cover done by the extremely talented Josh Kirby who has been illustrating all of Pterry’s books. Unfortunately, Josh Kirby has passed onto the art gallery in the sky and Pterry’s latest book – ‘The Night Watch’ - had its cover done by Paul Kidby and is supposedly based on Van Gogh’s painting by the same name... but I have not yet seen the book and so don’t know if I will remain as mesmerized by the covers.

The book that I picked up that day at Vijitha Yapa’s was ‘Wyrd Sisters’. It was my first initiation to the wonderful and wacky world of the Disc as well as to the witches of the Ramtops. Since the whole book was a parody of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, I enjoyed every bit of parody and chortled with glee.

As I progressed, I realized that there was more to it. The book as a whole was parodying a lot more than just ‘Macbeth!’ There were references to Monopoly, Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘King Lear’, ‘Hamlet’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Tolkien (and rings that were hard to get rid of), Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Cats’ and ‘Starlight Express’, Stanley Kubrick’s classic horror ‘The shining’, Frank Baum’s ‘Wizard of Oz’ and Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, etc. And that’s probably within about the first half of the book!

In fact, reading Pterry’s books became something like a treasure hunt - you read them to find all the pop-culture references and be able to identify them. Sometimes you read them again to find the ones you missed the first time around because you were laughing so hard they were strapping you into a strait jacket. In fact, there are sites on the Internet, which are actually devoted to chronicling all the references (both actual and assumed) that Pratchett has made to other works in his Discworld series.

But is the Discworld simply about spoofing/parodying other works and making pop-culture references? Of course not! If it were, Pratchett probably would have fallen out of favour with the readers long before this. The attraction of the Discworld lies in the fact that it is a fantasy world that is actually a flat spinning disc carried on the backs of four elephants who in turn are standing on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. This world is populated by characters that are all too human - characters that we can recognize within ourselves and those around us.

There is Death, who while being unable to understand humanity and what drives them, wants to be human nonetheless and tries so hard at it that he sometimes turns out to be more human than the humans. Then there is Rincewind who can “scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty four,” and who believes that “he who runs away, lives to run another day”.

Pterry excels at creating such memorable and believable characters. In fact, the Discworld series now probably has sub-cults which each roots for a particular character because that one is their favourite. With over twenty-five books to choose from, it’s not hard to find one or more to like.

There is so much more I can tell you about Terry Pratchett, the Discworld and even some of his other non-Discworld books. But my words just would not be as effective nor as persuasive as those of Pterry himself. So why don’t you let him persuade you? Go on, pick up a Pratchett.

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