Wyrd Sisters

I came across the Bechdel Test in the context of a film review which decried the number of films which contained only a small number of token roles for women.

The test has three simple rules as follows:

1. The film has to have at least two women in it,

2. The women have to talk to each other.

3. They have to talk about something other than a man.

On this basis many mainstream/blockbuster films fail the test and this failure gives journalists the opportunity to write articles lamenting the number of decent roles for women etc.

What I had not realised until I looked it up was that the Bechdel Test has also been applied to literature. I've not carried out any detailed and wide-ranging analysis of this, but it did occur to me as I was reading Wyrd Sisters that the book passes with flying colours.

I'd struggled a little with Sourcery: it was great fun and really funny, but I've never been a massive fan of classic fantasy novels.  However from its first page I could see that Wyrd Sisters was something different. I'd studied Macbeth (aka The Scottish Play if you are superstitious), but even without this extra level of understanding the plot simply whizzed along.

For me this is the novel that re-confirmed my plan to explore Discworld in sequence: I've started so I'll definitely finish..



 

Pratchett Job

The past few weeks have been busy as I have progressed on with my journey into Discworld.

To date my route has been chronological, in that I have read the books in the order in which Sir Terry published them, and in truth my reading is well in advance of this blog. As I've progressed I've come to realise the truth of Neil Gaiman's comment that this is not necessarily the best way to proceed: the same applies to P G Wodehouse, where everyone reads Jeeves and Wooster and/or Bandings whereas his early school stories are for completists only.

In reading terms I'm about halfway through the Discword canon although in blogging terms I've hardly started... Nonetheless I found that the Pratchett job blog was really useful in giving me direction:

https://pratchettjob.wordpress.com/

I have enjoyed just about every book I have read so far, although some more than others, but the good news is that the best is yet to come.

 

Terry Pratchett: Back in Black

I'd mentally bookmarked this programme even before I'd read the reviews and last night managed to catch up with it on iPlayer.

It was at least as good as the reviews. I enjoyed the dramatisations of the autobiographical fragments, but the interviews with other writers were, for me, the highlight. Inevitably Neil Gaiman, visibly emotional as he spoke about his late friend, was the highlight, but it was one of his comments that really stayed in my mind: it took Terry Pratchett some time to get into his stride and his early books are definitely not his best. as a comparison he mentioned the early school stories of P G Wodehouse, another of my heroes.

I've read many of the Blandings and Jeeves &Wooster novels, plus several selections of short stories, but I've never even seen any of his early works in print. Neil Gaiman specifically mentioned Sourcery as not being one of his best. I read it and enjoyed it, but it was not in the same league as Mort.

Thus it is now time to move on to Wyrd Sisters.


 

Sourcery

Sourcery was published in 1988 and for some reason the version that I recently ordered online is smaller than the other Pratchett books I have bought so far.

I'm not one of those obsessives that keeps books in a specific order, or even like someone I worked with once who stored her books according to the colour of the spine. Thus I note this merely from the perspective of someone who wears reading glasses although of course there was no reduction in the size of the font - merely more pages...

 I enjoyed the book very much but over the holiday period became side-tracked by other things - especially a really funny spin-off book by Mr Pratchett (and others) called Nanny Ogg's Cookbook. I've not had a chance to test any of the recipes but laughed all the way through it. we have a shelf full of cookery books at home, but this is the first one written by a fictional character. I'd love to see it made into a TV series.

And now back to the main Discworld opus...