Thyroid

Discworld

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Maybe Guards! Guards! or possibly Small Gods? Guards! Guards!, like Equal Rites, plays with fantasy and storytelling tropes like the hapless town guards, the destined heir and the million-to-one shot; Small Gods is my favourite Discworld so I'm biased but it's a razor-sharp satire of faith and how organised religion is often at odds with it. Both are early in the series; I really like the much more recent Going Postal as well, which works on its own. If you're giving the entire series another shot I'd go with an earlier one; if you just intend to pick out the choicest morsels then Going Postal's a good choice.

 

These along with 2 of the witches books are pretty much my favorites too (from what i can remember back in the mists of time). I stopped enjoying Diskworld a long time ago though. It got to a point where i felt he was just pulling something or anything out of contemporary interest to riff on, and a lot of them just lacked some sparkle - kinda like a bad episode of South Park.

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Well I'm about done with the ones I'm interested in with Discworld. And Guards Guards was seriously entertaining, while Small Gods is in my top books ever written.

 

Frankly I think he loses something of the edge he had as he goes along, as can and often does happen to many. I enjoyed Going Postal, but it just felt too comfortable, even though as someone who almost graduated with an economics degree I adore his description of finance and money as a "shared dream that everyone believes in." That's about the best simple way to explain what money actually is that I've ever heard. I also tried reading Thud and it just didn't even click with me.

 

And like most I liked The Watch as a series the best. And even though I'm not interested in the other half of Discworld and more (Death gets boring after Mort, and I only liked 1 of the Witch novels, and Rincewind is seriously uneven) I still can't think of an author I've liked as much as Pratchett for sheer volume of novels, though if I counted them out Master and Commander as a series may come close. Still, all praise to Pratchett. Hope The Last Hero does well.

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The Dollar General near my house had a few Discworld paperbacks for $1. I grabbed Eric. So far I'm digging how colorful the writing is. Is this book considered an okay introduction to the series? 

Edit: Ahh, just saw that chart.

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I haven't read a Discworld book in years, but I absolutely devoured them in highschool. I think I've read more Terry Pratchett than any other single fiction author, and he's had a big hand in informing my tastes and attitudes as a young adult.

 

If it isn't obvious, I'm posting in this thread because Terry Pratchett died today. It hit me surprisingly hard. I have the strongest urge to go back, now, and read some of the ~50 Pratchett books I never got around to.

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I'm truly saddened by his death, he's the one who made me realizing reading books could be fun even when school didn't ask me to read a book. 

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This is a fucking goofy, almost embarrassing thing to admit, but I think the two cultural artifacts that most informed my personal development were Monkey Island and Discworld. I know that I'm not unique in this.

EDIT: of course this starts a new page. Damnit.

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"One day I'll be dead and THEN you'll all be sorry."
-- (Terry Pratchett, 28 Nov 1992, on alt.fan.pratchett)

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I'm so saddened by this. I've been a fan and reading Pratchett since the late 80s, his work has been a fixture of over 2 decades of my life. I wasted so much time during my university career on alt.fan.pratchett.

I started re-reading the Discworld novels in order this year. I was expecting to finish Interesting Times on the train home this evening, but couldn't face it after the news.

Thank you Terry.

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I'm thinking of going back and reading MORT (for obvious reasons) or maybe one of the Witches books because I felt in the later books Granny Weatherwax & her weird memories problems after 'borrowing' and in some of the alternate world memories stuf kinda reflected what Pratchett must have being going through.

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I feel weird about him dying. I've been a huge fan of his as long as I could read, and one of the most influential parts of his writing for me has been his writing about death. My family has a history with Alzheimer's, and I'm slowly watching both my grandfathers progress further into the disease. It's been consistently there in the lives of the last 2 generations on both sides of my family, and more prevalent on the male lines. It's heartbreaking, and personally terrifying knowing that as of now, I'm just watching myself 50-odd years in the future. One of the few things that's provided me comfort about that fate is Terry Pratchett. I know it's a long way off for me, but knowing that there is a guy who shares the same endpoint as me and who isn't afraid of it, and moreso uses that anger to create such amazing books is deeply, deeply inspiring to me. It's also made me less afraid of dying in any way, and made me appreciate my life and the lives of everything around me. The most amazing thing, I feel, is that this is true even of his books from before he was diagnosed. He lived a long, rich life before he knew it was ending with an ethic I could only come to with a selfish worry about my own life. He was an amazing man.

I don't know how to feel, but I feel both horrible and almost relieved that it ended for him the way it did, and that makes me feel worse, and then I imagine he'd call me a selfish ass for wishing he'd had a few more years, and then I feel more bad because he'd be right and I still would feel the same way. 
The death of a spirit and life only begins when it is no longer spoken or thought of. Long may he live.

(PS If you can, burn a fire tonight. If the old gods are still there, no one I know deserves their attention right now more than him, and if they aren't, he'd still appreciate it. Win-Win.)

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It's worth noting in that context that Terry's version was a rare, different one that affected the body more than the mind.

I'm going to miss him so much, though his last couple of books felt rather cranky, for lack of a better word.

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B_6DrdXWQAAaqI8.jpg

 

“DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”

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This is a fucking goofy, almost embarrassing thing to admit, but I think the two cultural artifacts that most informed my personal development were Monkey Island and Discworld. I know that I'm not unique in this.

EDIT: of course this starts a new page. Damnit.

 

Same here, will try to fix that, feel like a jerk as it has always been on my "to-read" list. 

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So sad to hear that Terry Pratchett passed away, he really was one of a kind, both in terms of his writing and of course in his character.

 

I started in on his books really early in my life, before I was even capable of reading them properly, let alone understanding them. For some reason, despite neither of my parents being readers, we had The Carpet People and Diggers on the bookshelf, and that amazing cover art just sucked me in before even reading a single page.

 

I remember being struck by the powerful imagery and the philosophical musings, presented in an off-the-cuff, conversational style. He had a wonderful gift for grounding a big idea, and making it seem smaller and more manageable, much like Douglas Adams. After I'd read those, I went to the library and started in on the Discworld books, whichever I could get my hands on. I think my first might have been Eric, which isn't bad, but I always liked the City Watch the most.

 

If I had to choose a favourite it'd be Guards! Guards!, but I regret not having read quite a few of the more popular ones, so will do my best to correct that.

 

RIP Terry

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On 12/03/2015 at 9:14 PM, dium said:

This is a fucking goofy, almost embarrassing thing to admit, but I think the two cultural artifacts that most informed my personal development were Monkey Island and Discworld. I know that I'm not unique in this.

EDIT: of course this starts a new page. Damnit.

You know, I've done some "high-minded" reading.

 

I love intellectual ping-pong as much as anybody.

 

But the sincerity and heart in Monkey Island and Discworld both are damn fine constituents in anyone's formative fiber and beautiful works of art.

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The Pratchett quote in the xkcd eulogy is marvellous, especially with the first sentence included.

 

terry_pratchett.png

 

I should read more of his books.

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While I won close to 40 Terry Pratchett books, his death has caused me to seek out the books of his I dont own and I was very happy to discover that their is an illustrated version of the book Faust.So i bought it. HOWEVER they have visually redeisnged the books (again) and if I was ritch I would re-buy them all but i just cannot.

 

Thoughts on the redesign? Its a pastel faux fabric design as opposed to the busy illustrated ones or the black minimalit ones.

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I woke up to this bizarre article from the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/aug/31/terry-pratchett-is-not-a-literary-genius

 

You know, it takes a special amount of gall to dismiss an author having never read his books, especially if you spend the rest of your breath name-dropping other universally acclaimed pieces of literature as if they're some kind of gnosis.

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Wow. Why is that guy so angry?

 

Insecure, fussy elitism is alive and well! Everything is a "disturbing cultural phenomenon" now.

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Look, he's over there declaring Bukowski to not be middlebrow so you can pretty much just ignore him and let him throw his little tantrum in peace.

 

I wonder if he wanted to write a short piece on how nice it was to discover Bukowski over the summer, but his editor wanted something on Terry Pratchett, who's actually relevant right now, and this is how we got these, uh... five hundred words of prose.

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I'm surprised and disappointed that the Guardian would resort to this obvious trolling nonsense just for a few stray clicks on a wet bank holiday

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