Bookish Thoughts

Re-reading the Tiffany Aching books has been a joy. Pratchett is at the height of his game here, and these books are basically perfect. I can't wait to share these books with my kid, and in the meantime I've been pushing them on all the neighborhood kids. Though they're mostly still too young for them, too. (Actually, my proudest moment was when a conservative mom was asking me for book recs for her daughter, and I convinced her to buy a series by beloved anarchist Ursula K LeGuin). Anyway, this is the second of Tiffany Aching's adventures. She's leaving home to spend some time as an apprentice to a witch. She meets some other witches her own age, learns that being a witch is mostly doing things that other people don't want to do, and has to deal with a hiver to boot. The hiver is a collection of sense and memories that takes over bodies, collecting new memories and basically doing whatever it wants. It's attracted to power, so it's attracted to Tiff...

Coming off one of my least-favorite Discworld  books, we head straight into my favorite one. I don't necessarily think it's the best book in the series, though it's certainly up there. But it pits the Witches (my favorite main characters) against a family of vampires (my favorite villain). So of course I'm going to love it. And there's a lot to love here. Magrat has just had a baby is trying to figure out how to be a queen and a witch while taking care of a newborn. Granny Weatherwax makes her biggest sacrifice yet in an attempt to defeat the vampires, and there's legitimate concern that her methods may cause her to join them instead. Agnes is still trying to figure out where she ends and Perdita begins, all while fighting off the unwelcome romantic attentions of one of the vampires. And an Omnian priest with serious doubts finds himself on an adventure he never asked for. One of my favorite things about this book is the interactions between Agnes and Vlad, ...

Going back through the Discworld series has reminded me just how much I love the witches. And that reminder prompted me to look up why I'd forgotten. It turns out there's only one more book featuring the witches, which is sad. Although that is one of my favorite books in the entire series. And there's still all of Tiffany Aching to look forward to. Still, this book introduces the incomparable Agnes Nitt, and it's a shame that she's only in one more book. She's a wonderful character, constantly struggling between being polite and not being a doormat. She wants to be seen for who she is, rather than what she looks like, but she's still struggling to figure out who she is and who she wants to be. That may or may not be a with, but it's definitely not propping other people out without any recognition. Maskerade is a lovely send-up of The Phantom of the Opera , with Agnes in the role of a much stronger and smarter Christine. Though that's entirely b...

I didn't cry when Terry Pratchett died. This was a combination of many things. I've known he was sick since before I began reading his books. I've known that he was living on borrowed time. In his later years he emerged as a strong advocate for assisted death, and it was always his stance that he wanted to die before he lost his mind completely. Before he stopped being himself. I made peace with that early in my relationship with his books, so when I learned that he died in his bed surrounded by family having recently finished his final book, well it seemed like a close second to his stated desire to die while sitting in the backyard with a nice glass of whiskey. There was also the fact that I learned this news on the ski slope in Colorado shortly before a wedding. Grief wasn't an emotion I was willing to experience that weekend. I could push it back, so I did. When his final book was released, I read a review and started crying. When I finally bought the book, ...

I went in to this book thinking how nice it was to finally reach the point of the Discworld series where we get some continuity from book to book. Which speaks to my aggressive blocking out of Rincewind more than anything. Rincewind has, up to this point, essentially had one long adventure broken up over four books. But as they are my least favorite books in the series, I tend to forget them. The witches, on the other hand, are some of my favorite characters. And though this is the fourth book Esme Weatherwax has appeared in, it's the first one to really deal with the consequences of a previous book. Back in Wyrd Sisters , Magrat fell in love with Verence. Then she ran away from the whole thing in Witches Abroad . And now she's returning to discover that Verence has already planned their entire wedding and it's happening soon. There are also elves, set on coming to our world and ruining everything in service of their own entertainment and short attention spans. So Gran...

It's not a stretch to call  Witches Abroad  one of my most influential books. It might very well be my most influential book. It changed the way I look at the world, especially at stories. This book points out tropes and then picks them apart and undermines them, all while playing by the rules of the narrative. After reading it, I started paying much closer attention to everything else I was reading. I developed a feel for stories and began to really understand how they work and why. On it's surface,  Witches Abroad  is a silly book that combines fairy tales and road trips. The witches travel to Genua to defeat an evil fairy godmother, and along the way they encounter any number of "rural myths", from Sleeping Beauty to Dracula to Little Red Riding Hood. It's those encounters, all leading up to the final encounter that add so much hilarity and richness to the book. Moreso than any other Discworld book, and this is a common theme in the series, this book is about...

Wyrd Sisters  is a giant step up in the quality of  Discworld  books. There's an interesting and complicated plot, driven by the actions of a cast of delightful characters. There's a wonderful subplot concerning a storm who hopes to one day make it big. There's sharp and subtle commentary on the nature of ruling and of fiction and rumors. And there are enough Shakespeare references to make your head spin, given that this is largely a parody of  Macbeth . It's no wonder that a majority of the fandom considers  Wyrd Sisters  to be the first good book in the series. It is often recommended as a starting point, even though it's technically the second book in the "witches" subseries. But it's so much smarter and more fun and better plotted than anything came before. The first few books can be off putting to people new to Discworld, though they are fun in their own right. But it's so refreshing to get to this point and see the Discworld I've grown ...

The third book in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is a huge leap forward in terms of quality. Equal Rites is basically a precursor to the Tiffany Aching books that Pratchett wrote more recently. It focuses on young Eskarina Smith, an eight-year-old girl (based on Pratchett's daughter) on a journey to become a wizard. Around this time, Pratchett had noticed an interesting trend in fantasy literature: men get to be wizards while women have to be witches. Wizards get cool, flashy magic. They get to save the world and be important. Witches are old and ugly and evil and usually get burned at the stake. So we get a book that tries to fight that dichotomy, while at the same time elevating witch magic and arguing that maybe wizard magic isn't all it's cracked up to be. There are some great puns in this book, side with side with some truly cutting commentary about the differences between the sexes. The plot is far more cohesive than in any of the previous t...

Witches and vampires in one book!  How could I not love this? My most recent trip to Terry Pratchett's Discworld was via Carpe Jugulum .  In this book, the king and queen of Lancre have just given birth to their first daughter.  Being the forward-looking monarch he is, King Verence decides to invite the rulers of all the neighboring kingdoms, including the vampires next door, to the naming ceremony.  But these aren't your old, dusty vampires; they're modern vampyres. I thought of Andrew every single time I read that word. Once the vampyres have received their invitation to the princess's naming ceremony, they're free to enter the kingdom of Lancre.  They intend to take over the kingdom and use its inhabitants as an all-you-can-eat buffet.  It's up to the witches to stop them and save the day. There's also an Christian Omnian priest along for the ride.  He's an interesting character in that he's constantly questioning himself and h...