Reading off the rails - updated

You might remember at the start of the year I set myself a reading challenge. I only had to get through 24 books in a year, which isn't too much of a problem for me, except I was derailed by the sad death of Terry Pratchett. He was, of course, no stranger to Death. The skeleton everyone loves to read about is a regular character in (almost) every Pratchett book ever published. HE TALKS IN CAPITALS. You can't miss him. And I've been spending time with him since I heard the news of Pratchett's passing. Not as much as Pratchett has, of course, but enough. I read Mort first, the story of how Death takes on an apprentice. I followed that with Johnny and the Dead, the tale of Johnny Maxwell, an ordinary boy who has extraordinary experiences. In this case he finds he can see dead people who 'live' in a cemetery that's about to be demolished to make way for a new development.

I'll get back on track with the challenge soon, but I'm not promising I'll fulfill all the requirements. But then, who cares if I don't? 

Update:   There is a section in the reading challenge that says: "A book that you would consider a guilty pleasure (Read, and then realise that good entertainment is nothing to feel guilty over) "
So I'm claiming Terry Pratchett as my guilty pleasure. I've loved his books since I first found him and I tend to go back to him when I can't think what else to read.  So I've done another one!

Thursday quotes: Terry Pratchett on Books

“If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.”
― Terry Pratchett

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It's not an extract. It's a quote.

Thursday extracts: Pratchett and names

Whenever I write, one of my biggest challenges comes in finding believable names for my characters. I sometimes stoop to wandering around churchyards looking for suitable contributions from headstones.  Terry Pratchett has no such problem. The names he creates are instantly recognisable, even when they are totally insane.  In Dodger, his latest novel, the story is set in Dickensian London, and the dramatis personae includes some wonderfully descriptive names.

The dog is called Onan, by the way. I had to look that one up.

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Some of the lads and lasses were drinking outside the Gunner's Daughter, sitting on the old barrels, bundles of rope, hopeless piles of rotting wood and all the other debris of the riverside. Sometimes it seemed to Dodger that the city and the river were simply all the same creature except for the fact tht some parts were a lot more soggy than others. 

Right now, in this tangled, smelly but usually cheerful disarray, he recognised Bent Henry, Lucy Diver, One-Armed-Dave, Preacher, Mary-Go-Round, Messy Bessie and Mangle.

Dodger
Terry Pratchett
2012

Thursday Extracts. For Sandra's son......

.......because I feel sorry for Professor Littlewood. (And I make NO apologies for quoting Terry Pratchett again because he knows how the world works - even if it is flat and carried on the back of four elephants that are riding on a huge turtle.)

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Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.



― Terry Pratchett, Mort

Thursday extracts. Terry Pratchett on books and libraries

Where to begin with Terry Pratchett? Practically any sentence he wrote could be given as a fantastic example of great writing, amazing humour, wonderful imagination, or just the vast range of knowledge the man has to apply from Roundworld to his creation.  Six-foot dwarves, gargoyles on stake-outs, dragons as pets, an orang-utan librarian, almost everything he writes is a fresh view of a potentially tired topic.

I figured the best thing would be to use part of his view on books, and more particularly, his concept of L-space, the mysterious effect that large collections of books can have on the world around them.

The following extract comes shortly after a discussion of the dangers to be found in the magical library at Unseen University, but demonstrates perfectly how Pratchett's Discworld relates to our own round planet.

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Even big collections of ordinary books distort space and time, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned second-hand bookshop, one of those that has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves that end in little doors that are surely too small for a full sized human to enter.
The relevant equation is Knowledge = Power = Energy = Matter = Mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. Mass distorts space into polyfractal L-space, in which Everywhere is also Everywhere Else.
All libraries are connected in L-space by the bookwormholes created by the strong space-time distortions found in any large collection of books.

Guards! Guards!
First published 1989
Terry Pratchett