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...