Wis[s]e Words

Wyrd Sisters — Terry Pratchett

Published on November 4, 20121 Comment

Cover of Wyrd Sisters

Wyrd Sisters
Terry Pratchett
331 pages
published in 1988

The wind howled. Lightning stabbed at the earth erratically, like an inefficient assassin. Thunder rolled back and forth across the dark, rain-lashed hills.

The night was as black as the inside of a cat. It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which gods moved men as though they were pawns on the chessboard of fate. In the middle of this elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye. It illuminated three hunched figures. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?
There was a pause.
Finally another voice said, in for more ordinary tones: ‘Well, I can do next Tuesday’.

The opening paragraphs of Wyrd Sisters are a good indication of the rest of the book. This is MacBeth: Discworld style and the witches do not intend to stick to the script. That’s because Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are sensible witches and while the third member of the coven is a bit wet — as in, she actually believes in such things like covens — Magrat Garlick still has a steel core of good Lancrian common sense. They know better than to meddle in affairs (well, mostly) or dance with demons, never mind doing it skyclad. Yet when the king is murdered, his baby heir disappears and the usurper duke turns out not be just a bit evil, but actually uncaring about the land, they’re dragged into meddling against their own will.

Books read October

Published on November 2, 2012Leave a comment

Eleven books read all together this month, largely made possible by rereading some eight Pratchett novels.

Natural History — Justina Robson
Humanity has split itself into a multitude of forms, better to colonise the Solar System with. Then one of the first interstellar human ships finds the remnants of an alien vessel and the secrets of FTL travel and nothing will be the same…

The Hydrogen Sonata — Iain M. Banks
This is the latest Culture novel and somewhat of a disappointment. Good, but not as good as the last one, with a bit of a copout ending.

The Case of the Gilded Fly — Edmund Crispin
The first of Crispin’s Gervase Fen’s mysteries, in which an excentric Oxford don (aren’t they all) solves murders. This one is marred by the lack of sympathy shown to the victim as well ae the mindgames Fen plays with the suspects and readers both.

The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, Mort, Sourcery, Wyrd Sisters, Pyramids, Guards! Guards! — Terry Pratchett
The first eight Discworld novels, read both because I wanted something comfortable to read as well as because I wanted to re-examine the early Discworld novels. Arguably, it’s in these eight novels that Pratchett matures as a writer and the Discworld is shaped; by the time of Guards! Guards! most of the major subseries have been established.

Time Out

Published on November 1, 2012Leave a comment

I just wanted a Youtube video of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out to listen to at work, the cats were a bonus:

Ever since Youtube eased the length restrictions on uploaded videos a while ago people have been using it to share full length albums or concerts, but it’s usually done lazily, just a straight audio rip of an album with some cover art. This guy however (and somehow I do think it’s a bloke, as they tend to be more anorakish about these things) has gone out of his way to make the video almost as appealing as the music. He’s included the titles of the songs, the back cover text of the original album, not to mention some great shots of the record player doing its thing and his cats responding to the music.

Sourcery — Terry Pratchett

Published on October 31, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Sourcery

Sourcery
Terry Pratchett
285 pages
published in 1988

Sourcery is the fifth Discworld novel and the first one after the initial two novels to star Rincewind again. Over time fan opinion has switched to thinking the Rincewind novels are the weakest in the series, but I’ve always liked them myself and I think Sourcery holds up as well as any of the other early novels. It’s the first novel in which there’s a real villain, the first tiem we get to see what makes a real villain in Pratchett’s eyes.

On a surface level there are some similarities to Equal Rites: again there’s a powerful, untrained magic user coming to Ankh Morpork to shake up the Unseen University, but this time he’s not so benign. Coin is not the eight son of an eight son, but the eight son of a wizard. And when a wizard has an eight son, that son doesn’t become a wizard himself, but a sourcerer, a source of magic. The magic he yields is not the tame, nice magic which is the only kind of magic the Discworld has known for ians, but wild magic, the magic from the dawn of times. Not perhaps the kind of magic you’d want a ten year old boy to have, even if his dead father has possessed his wizard staff to give him counsel.

Grief

Published on October 30, 20121 Comment

The thing about grief is, that for me at last, it’s nothing like the grandstanding you see in movies or on tv. It’s not a great outpouring of emotion, no crying jags, no dramatic shakings of fists at uncaring heavens, just that dull, gnawing pain in the pit of your stomach, occasionally forgotten or unnoticed, but always there. It’s just there, whatever you do, churning.

It’s almost a year now since she died and it seems like forever. You slide deceptively easily back into your daily routines after that initial period of shock, just existing day to day, getting on with life. Yet that feeling remains at the edge of your consciousness that she’s just stepped out of the room, you could pick up the phone and call her, she’s still lying there in hospital if you’d care to visit. So many times during a day that you hear something or see something or read something you’d want to share and so many times you stop short, wait, you can’t do that anymore.

The worst comes at night. The worst always comes at night. All the suppressed anxieties of the day are expressed in dreams, part of the half familiar, half distored landscape of your subconsciousness. There she is, waiting and sometimes you know it’s a dream and she’s dead and sometimes you don’t, but the worst are those that you know but it had all been a mistake. That glimmer of hope you know is wrong and which evaporates when you wake up, setting you up nicely for yet another day.