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Terry Pratchett
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Book
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Publisher | Doubleday | ||
ISBN | 978-038561177 | ||
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Reviewer
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Jacqui
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Synopsis
'A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.' From, "The Fifth Elephant". 'Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.' From, "Moving Pictures. The Discworld is filled with a vast and diverse population - from witches to vampires and from the fiendish to the foolish, it is a world in which magical books can devour the unsuspecting, and Death can escape to the country for some time off. "The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld" is a collection of the wittiest, pithiest and wisest quotations from this extraordinary universe, dealing one-by-one with each book in the canon. Guaranteed to transport you back to your favourite or forgotten Discworld moments it is the perfect book for die-hard Pratchett fans, as well as anyone coming to the Discworld for the first time.
Review
This book is a review in itself detailing "The Wit and Wisdom" of Terry Prachett's popular Discworld series. It takes you book by book in chronological order through the series, picks out the most amusing jokes, situations, exchanges, moments and presents it in a fast pace newspaper column layout. This makes for rapid, easy reading that the author would like readers to "dip into" whenever they have a spare moment or need a laugh. This also makes it ideal and more accessible for those who cannot find time or sometimes the patience to read a whole book and the selection of quotes allows them to get straight into the action and still enjoy Terry Pratchett's books. With these aims in mind, the author also hopes through samping little sections of each book that a reader may be pursuaded to purchase a title from the Discworld series.
What I love about Terry Pratchett's writing is that he writes sometimes that would sound perfectly normal in any other SciFi/Fantasy book and then adds a completely bizarre twist off the scale of reality. For example:
"...'Once upon a time a really powerful magic fiel must have been generated here, and we're feeling the after-effects'.
'Precisely,' said a passing bush." (pg 15, 2nd para)
Pratchett also achieves this with sentences that are not normal to begin with:
"'You don't understand!' screamed the tourist, above the terrible noise of the wingbeats. 'All my life I've wanted to see dragons'
'From the inside?' shouted Rincewind." (pg 15, 3rd para)
In Pratchett's Discworld anything is possible - even inanimate objects have a voice, opinion and at times a distinctly argumentative dark side: "'You're your own worst enemy Rincewind,' said the sword." (pg 15, 4th para)
As a said above, the point of this book is to "dip into" it whenever we have spare moments - and this is exactly what I will do now. Already being an avid reader of the Discwork series my number one book is, "Maskerade", a take off on The Phantom of the Opera - the quotes from this are found on page 147. Having navigated to this section, the first page gives me the cover blurb, often written by Pratchett - so I have a rough idea what the book is about. After a quick inspection of this section I find my favourite quote which reads:
"Ahahahahaha!
Ahahahaha!
Aahahaha!
BEWARE!!!!!
Yrs sincerely,
The Opera Ghost"
'What sort of person,' said Salzella, 'sits down and writes a manical laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone that wears his under-pants on his head. Opera can do that to a man'."
I hope this has pursuaded you to find out more about this book and the rest of the amazing Discworld series!
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