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Terry Pratchett

From This Reader’s Shelf

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Today I’m going to take a timeout from being a Serious Editing Professional and let you in on a secret: most every editing professional is a hopeless, passionate book lover. Don’t let them fool you with their comma-tinkering, fierce plot critiques, or official-sounding titles. Many of them are astute, professionally trained, and incredibly skilled, but underneath those things, they’re enthusiastic readers. I’m no different.

To give you a peek at my reader-life, today I’m going to share a look at my bookshelf. This is a special bookshelf: it’s transient. I’m in the middle of a months-long visit to an Air Force base, but since it’s only months long instead of a year or more, my husband and I left most of our books in my parents’ shed in Utah (thank heaven for their free space; we stole plenty of it). Here are all our books, minus books of scripture, those in foreign languages, and those I’m currently reading.

Kristy G. Stewart's Bookshelf

The Breakdown

Some of these books are titles Mr. Stewart and I have acquired since arriving here: you’ll see both Thief’s Covenant and The Rook, books that have only come out since the start of the year. There are also some necessary work-related books: the two most recent versions of The Chicago Manual of Style (or as I like to call it, BOB, for Bright Orange Bible); Eats, Shoots & Leaves; Editors and Editing; and Rewriting (which is the most useful book I’ve ever found about academic writing). Not shown is the APA publication manual.

Seven of the books directly draw on folklore or collect folktales. Yes, I read both the tales and the commentary included in The Classic Fairy Tales (edited by Maria Tatar). That’s the black book between Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Best-Loved Folktales of the World.

There’s only one book of poetry (prose is more my speed). Unless you count my Poe collection, which has both poetry and prose.

Yes, I have a complete collection of Poe covered with creepy red decor. I also have a less-complete collection packed in my parents’ shed.

Genre-wise, there’s biography, YA, dark fantasy, satirical fantasy, science fiction, horror, war fiction, nonfiction, and instructional books on screenwriting and typography. There is also a whole host of classics, but they’re contained in that sneaky little eReader on the bottom left, hidden beneath Billy Collins. (I don’t love my eReader, but I love that it carries my classic library for me.)

The books that are horizontal on the bottom of the shelf are books I brought because I am frequently set upon by sudden impulses to re-read them, so I couldn’t bear to leave them. Included in that list is Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, one of my favorites in his repertoire, which is also hidden in the eReader. If I had a hard copy, I would have brought it.

I haven’t read four books on this shelf: John Adams (I just haven’t been able to sit down to a page commitment that big since we got here), the Dean Koontz books on the right (recent acquisitions from my father-in-law), and The Hundred Dresses on the top left (a recent acquisition from my mom).

Kristy G. Stewart's "Currently Reading" Stack

In addition to that abused shelf, I have three books that I’m currently reading or am about to read. They migrate through the house with me, from kitchen to couch to bedroom and back. One of them (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland) just arrived today, and it’s hard to make myself wait to open its covers. I probably won’t hold out much longer.

If you could only bring one shelf’s worth of your books with you on a months-long expedition, which ones couldn’t you do without? Do you ever read more than one book at a time?

(Rules: Saying “I’d get an e-version of everything and just take my Kindle” doesn’t count unless you really do have your entire library on your ereader. In which case, if you only had a shelf’s worth of memory on your ereader, which files would you keep?)

Yearly Book Traditions

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Now that it’s after Christmas, I am going to indulge in one of my yearly book traditions. In addition to reading whatever books my family have been so kind as to give me, I’m also going to read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. I’m going to read it before January. Why?

The Dark Is Rising by Susan CooperWell, primarily because it is traditional. Secondarily, I read The Dark Is Rising every year because it is a book I love dearly. The book, and the whole Dark Is Rising sequence, is something I can easily fall into an immerse myself in. It’s an enveloping kind of book that completely transports me into the realm between its pages. I like to increase that feeling of immersion by reading this book during the time in which it takes place. The majority of the action in The Dark Is Rising occurs in the twelve days following Christmas. Being surrounded by snow while the English countryside of the story descends into winter makes the book that much more powerful. (This tradition isn’t hurt by the fact that my grandma, who has since passed away, was the one who gave me my copies of Susan Cooper’s sequence.)

The Dark Is Rising isn’t the only book I reread every year. I tend to reread The Last Unicorn (I explain that in this post about Peter S. Beagle), The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, and Night Watch by Terry Pratchett.

Collage of Favorites' Covers

Ella Enchanted is pure delight, a smooth read, and it only takes me about one sitting to read it cover to cover. It’s easy to come back to as a comfort read. It’s like good macaroni and cheese.

All the other books have a certain way of enveloping me, of making me feel things deeply. They all wound, enlighten, and enlarge me in powerful ways. Along the way, yes, Pratchett makes me laugh; yes, Beagle charms me with his descriptions; yes, O’Brien systematically questions my trust in narrative truth. But the thing they share in common is that these books have heart to them, and I compulsively return to that living heart year after year.

Are there any books you read yearly, or are there just a few books you keep around for rereading? Or do you eschew rereads?

Leaflet Review: Snuff by Terry Pratchett

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Snuff by Terry PratchettAt long last, Lady Sybil has lured her husband, Sam Vimes, on a well-deserved holiday away from the crime and grime of Ankh-Morpork. But for the commander of the City Watch, a vacation in the country is anything but relaxing. The balls, the teas, the muck—not to mention all that fresh air and birdsong—are more than a bit taxing on a cynical city-born and -bred copper.

Yet a policeman will find crime anywhere if he decides to look hard enough, and it’s not long before a body is discovered, and Sam—out of his jurisdiction, out of his element, and out of bacon sandwiches (thanks to his well-meaning wife)—must rely on his instincts, guile, and street smarts to see justice done. As he sets off on the chase, though, he must remember to watch where he steps. … This is the countryside, after all, and the streets most definitely are not paved in gold.

I’ve mentioned before that I adore Terry Pratchett’s novels, right? Almost as much as I love fairy tales. And most of my favorite Discworld novels are Sam Vimes Discworld novels, so of course I had to read Snuff, Pratchett’s most recent release.

For any of you who haven’t read any Discworld novels and don’t know anything about them, let me preface this by saying that you can pick up pretty much any Discworld novel and read it without reading those that preceded it. The novels all stand alone reasonably well. That said, I’d recommend reading Thud, the last Sam Vimes novel, before picking up Snuff. There are some things I believe would make a lot more sense if you’ve read Thud.

Snuff is a fun read, enjoyably paced and full of Pratchett’s distinctive voice. Sam Vimes is just as wonderful as always: who doesn’t love a cop who does whatever he can to make the world right, while still holding himself to the law because he understands he needs it just as much as anyone? With all the TV shows with devil-may-care protagonists, Vimes stands apart. He always gets his man, but he knows when he’s crossing lines that shouldn’t be crossed, and his integrity in that is always impressive.

Praise like that for a character in a comic novel sounds a little odd, and it should. Snuff wasn’t the sort of gut-bustingly funny novel that Pratchett has turned out in the past. I didn’t laugh out loud very often (though I did still), and there wasn’t quite as much absurdity in it. The novel felt more serious to me than most of Pratchett’s work, although it didn’t reach the elegant poignancy of Night Watch, my favorite novel of Pratchett’s.

All in all, I enjoyed Snuff. I’d recommend it to people. I recommend it to you. But I can’t say that it’s the best thing Discworld has seen. Nor is it the worst. When compared to other Discworld novels, it stands up somewhere in the middle of the road. Still, that means it’s miles ahead of many other things I read.

Leaflet Review: A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

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A Hat Full of Sky by Terry PratchettWitch-in-training Tiffany Aching hadn’t expected magic to involve chores and ill-tempered nanny goats! But as Tiffany pursues her calling, a sinister monster pursues Tiffany, and neither mistress Weatherwax (the greatest witch in the world) nor the six-inch-high Wee Free Men (the greatest thieves in the world) can defeat it. When the monster strikes, Tiffany will have to save herself—if she can be saved at all!

I love Terry Pratchett, so I can hardly say anything bad about his books—even though, with so many books on the market, I’m bound to not like some of them. But I liked A Hat Full of Sky. Perhaps not so much as its predecessor, The Wee Free Men, but it was still a very enjoyable book. As always is the case with Pratchett, I both laughed out loud and had a bit of thinking time to go with it.

That said, there were several times where I thought the main conflict had been resolved, only to discover there was a new conflict (though, to be fair, these conflicts were always attached and related; I just don’t think they were foreshadowed). They felt a bit tacked on, if you ask me. However, all the conflicts were thematically consistent, even if they didn’t seem to be all part of the same action arc, so it wasn’t really bad. I was just expecting a book unified by a single action; if I’d been expecting a thematic work I wouldn’t have noticed it at all.

As with The Wee Free Men, the book waxes philosophical. (What? In a children’s book? Absurd.) Pratchett gets away with it because it’s natural to the character—all the ideas are in Tiffany’s voice and they’re things Tiffany would think, what with her First, Second, and Third Thoughts running around. She’s bound to run into some heavy thinking. The other reason it works so well is that Pratchett makes you laugh while he’s going about it, and the things he talks about aren’t controversial in any way: they’re just thing you may not have thought about very much before. Like how full the universe is of things that are interesting an amazing, and how you should never reduce people to things, etc. He couches them in a context that brings the ideas home.

(As a side note, The Wee Free Men introduced ideas that I repackaged and repurposed for discussion in a literary theory class in college. My comments were referenced throughout the semester for their brilliant-ness and relevance, and I felt a little dirty not mentioning that I’d gotten them from a humorous young-adult fantasy novel. But you can’t parenthetically cite your source while you’re talking. At least, I haven’t figured out how to yet.)

That’s really what Pratchett does for me: He takes things I should know and presents them in a mirror that’s ever so slightly askew so I’ll actually see them. Defamiliarization is the term, I believe. And while he defamiliarizes he delights, so I can never complain about a Pratchett book. I’ll definitely be reading the next book in the Tiffany Aching plot arc (once I chew through the stack of books next to my desk, that is), and I’ll probably end up buying them all so future children who use my house as a library will be able to read them. I wish I’d read them as a kid.