Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett

The read books are beginning to stack up on my desk, but the time to write about them is proving hard to come by. The last week has been big on damsons and dog sitting. My workmate bought me the last of the fruit from her tree - she is an absolute star for this, they're really lovely fruit and now I've got 2 kinds of damson jelly and a damson and vanilla jam. I am sharing this with her.

My mother's dog just considers everything that doesn't revolve around her is a waste of my time. I'd say that she's not wrong but this goes up to and includes sleeping - she thinks we ought to be up and walking by 5.30 so when I was still in bed at 5.45 she was very vocally put out. The combination of dog and mother is still the best way to put a hard week behind me that it's worth the early starts. It's even worth the general impression that the dog gives that one of them needs to keep me in sight at all times in case I go off with the spoons or something. 

I started reading Guards! Guards! immediately after Equal Rites and then stalled halfway through - a reminder of why I stopped reading Pratchett altogether back in the day. The book was fine I just got bored with the joke and had to make myself finish it. I might not have bothered but that I wanted to exorcise the horror that was the BBC adaptation a couple of years ago. 

In the end I'm glad I carried on. I have happy memories of reading Pratchett through some difficult times. He was a warm and funny guide to some of the complications of the adult world that I was beginning to negotiate in my late teens and if my reading taste has changed considerably since then, the essential decency of Pratchett is still a constant.

None of my younger colleagues at work have read him, so I'm going to try and persuade them to have a go - they're around what I consider to be the right age to discover him (early 20's,  younger would be a bit better). I have found that I really enjoy listening to Pratchett via audio books, more of which in my next post, so I'm not just trying to palm off unwanted review copies onto them. It's very much that I want to see what they think of him. 

When I first read these books it was in a recession, the one that saw Leicester lose great swathes of its textile industry, and a time that seemed quite bleak (halcyon days by current standards). At times like this a writer who can make you laugh and maybe believe that things will sort of work out has to be a good thing.