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"We think that the head is important, that the brain sits like a monarch on the throne of the body. But the body is powerful too, and the brain cannot survive without it." 

I Shall Wear Midnight

He was so prolific that it was easy to take his work for granted. Other than Michael Moorcock, there's probably been no other living author who's been as important to me, and yet I don't think I quite realised that before last Thursday's news. I can be very slow sometimes.

But ask me to pick a favourite of his books now, and I couldn't do it. It isn't simply that the Discworld is significant for me more as a series, rather than as any individual book. Besides, it isn't simply one series. It's a setting in which multiple series are braided together.

No, rather than any particular book - although for sure they varied in quality - if asked for a favourite I'd say it was a particular character. And I suppose I'd very obvious in my choices: Sam Vimes, perhaps. Definitely Granny Weatherwax.

I may well be mistaken in my surmise, but I always imagined that Tiffany Aching was a response to Pratchett's having developed Granny Weatherwax's character as far as she could go. Having a new character learning to be a witch meant that the world of witchcraft that he'd developed all became new. It also meant that the threats Tiffany faced felt genuinely menacing, which no longer really felt possible with Granny Weatherwax. Pure speculation on my part of course.

Anyway, I'd judge that I'm about half way through I Shall Wear Midnight right now, and I'm loving it as much as I ever loved one of his books. A comforting read, balanced by a sure awareness of the perils and moral choices that the world presents us all.

I'm also struck by how English it is. In constructing the Discworld, Pratchett borrowed from all sorts of places, cultures past and present, but the landscapes he repeatedly returned to all seem to belong to England. The world of the Chalk is clearly a rural English setting not that far removed from Hardy's Wessex. He was a very parochial writer in some ways.

And so I've set myself a reading goal for the next year. It was after I'd read Lords and Ladies I think, that I stopped reading Terry Pratchett's work. It was what I now think of as my 'grumpy teenager phase', when I convinced myself I was uninterested in some of the things I'd loved not long before and instead preferred to read work that was violent and gritty. Part of growing up perhaps is realising that comedy is often a far more 'realistic' representation of the world than is work which is self-consciously dark and unpleasant.

When I eventually came to my senses (at least, regarding the merits of Terry Pratchett's work), I decided to start at the beginning with The Dark Side of the Sun, and then read through everything in the order in which it was published, finally reading the one or two that I'd missed when I was younger, and eventually (or so I imagined) catching him up. Which I never quite managed to do.

So I'm going to catch up with him this year. It's not the reason for achieving this goal that I would have liked, but that's life. According to wikipedia, there's one, final Tiffany Aching book to appear in September, so I should hopefully be able to read the remaining books in time for the appearance in paperback of The Shepherd's Crown. There aren't that many, especially because I'm not including the science fiction series he wrote with Stephen Baxter. It just doesn't seem like the kind of sf that appeals to me, although you never know. I will read the two collections of shorter work though, so there's still a few to go. But I'll take them slowly, because I really don't want to reach the end.