Skip to main content

Congratulations Sir Terry

Terry Pratchett has been knighted. Congratulations, Sir Terry!

While the honour comes from his services to literature, he seems to be shaping up to become a spokesman for Alzheimer's research, which could very well have won him the honour in a few year's time, if he had not got it for his writing.

Comments

Tim said…
Happy New Year.
You might be interested to know that the BBC Radio 7 on the internet is running some Pratchett radio adaptations.Last week there was a 4 part adaptation of Mort and currently theres an airing of Wryd Sisters.
Knowing that you are a fan could you suggest the best book to introduce oneself to DiscWorld. I got overwhelmed by the sheer number of books hes written so any advice would be appreciated.

Finally I noted you had a Jeffery Steingarten book on your TBR list and wondering if you got round to reading it as Ive enjoyed two of his books and would recommend them.
Regards
huey
Bibliophile said…
Happy new year to you too, Huey.

Thanks for the heads-up about the Wyrd Sisters play.

There are several schools of thought about the best Discworld starter novel, but I recommend starting with any of the following: Guards! Guards!, Mort, Pyramids, Small Gods or Moving Pictures. The first two are starter books in sub-series within the Discworld series, and the others are one-offs that connect to the other books in various ways. All of these books can be enjoyed to the full without having read other Discworld books, as can the young adult books in the series. Here is a reading guide for more suggestions: http://www.us.lspace.org/books/reading-order-guides/the-discworld-reading-order-guide-1-5.pdf

I’ve read both of Steingarten’s essay collections, and find them to be thoughtful, informative and entertaining, and I hope there will be more. If you liked Steingarten, you might like some of Ruth Reichl’s writing, especially Garlic and Sapphires.

P.S. I like your blog and have added it to my blog feed.
Tim said…
Thanks for your suggestions regarding Disc World and Ruth Reichl.
My modest blog pales in comparison to your splendid
efforts.
Kind regards
Huey

Popular posts from this blog

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...