Light Reading

• Since I've been sick, I've apparently been on a Terry Pratchett kick. I just read through three of his books - The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and Reaper Man. For those who don't know anything about Terry Pratchett, he is a satirical fantasy writer...somewhat similar to Douglas Adams (although - and this is going to infuriate some friends of mine - I actually prefer Pratchett to Adams - a little less sci-fiey). He has created a rather bizarre world called Discworld, which is just that - a disc. These random characters have all sorts of adventures on this discworld, but truthfully, it's the mirror images they hold back at life that make him such a fascinating author.

These three books are just the most recent of his I read. They include some very interesting points. For example:

Wee Free Men: "Some things start before other things." Which is very logical if you simply think about it!

Or, (and the English major part of me loves this one!) "'Onomatopoeic, she'd discovered...mean words that sounded like the noise of thing they were describing, like cuckoo. But she thought there should be a word meaning a word that sounds like the noise a thing would make if that thing made a noise even though, actually, it doesn't, but would if it did. Glisten for example. If light made a noise as it reflected off a distant window, it'd go glint!. And the light of tinsel, all those little glints chiming together, would make a noise like glitterglitter. gleam was a smooth, clean noise from a surface that intended to shine all day. And glisten was the soft, almost greasy sound of something rich and oily."

Reaper Man - "...there is no such thing as somebody else's problem, and that just when you thought the world had pushed you aside it turned out to be full of strangeness. He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening because they were to busy being the living....It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful because life was too full of the boring and mundane."