Cultured
Nov 25, 2007
I’ve been reading Terry Pratchett recently. I suppose you could say this is like reading through John Grisham’s œuvre, but he writes funny, entertaining books that are hard to put down. And he doesn’t divide them into chapters. So I have a hard time stopping. I also discovered that much of Akira Kurosawa’s work in film is in the public domain and available from the Internet Archive. I just finished Ikiru (To Live) and he really got me in the end. Thought he was going for easy, but he didn’t.
danlyke
November 26th, 2007 at 8:30 pm #
Yay for Pratchett
I’m not sure Pratchett is litrachoor, but I think that Guards, Guards has some profound things to say about government and the notions of kings, Night Watch about police powers, and Making Money delves into issues of currency and the gold standard in ways that far surpass the depth of Grisham.
So I feel no guilt at all in re-reading Pratchett. Or working through his entire opus.
hexmode
November 29th, 2007 at 11:05 pm #
Re: Yay for Pratchett
I’ve just started Thud! and I swear part of it is just Pratchett retelling the story of the Lackawanna Six.
danlyke
November 30th, 2007 at 3:38 am #
Re: Yay for Pratchett
Yeah, IMHO he does an amazingly good job of doing satire, but making it just different enough from what he’s parodying that it doesn’t become preachy and whiny.
There are a number of places where I’ve had the “wait, that’s just… Oh, no, he managed to twist it just enough” feeling.
Some day I’m going to go back and read the original “Monstrous Regiment” tract that he was riffing on in his novel of the same name, though, just to see…