Category: 30 Day Book Challenge

It is quite unfair to ask me to pick my favourite Discworld book. I’ve read them for too long and under too many moods, I’ve grown up with them and returned to certain books one or two years later to discover entirely different points of joy. The world of the series is too large and diverse. There are too many characters and too many trajectories, and I have my favourites among all of them. I don’t know how to choose one over the others, so I’ll make up this post with the two books that I’ve gone back most often to read. These would be:

Both are Ankh-Morpork books and by listing them I feel I’m doing injustice to the Ramtops witches, to Death, and even to Rincewind and the wizards of the Unseen University. Too many excellent characters and stories are being left out. If you haven’t read Discworld, this post and the last will do no justice to it at all.
On the other hand, if you have, let this be my opportunity to entreat you to wear lilac two days from now in honour of Truth, Justice, Reasonably Priced Love and (not to forget) A Hard-Boiled Egg.

There was a time when the only attraction of going to the library was to borrow a new Discworld book. (School texts and other ‘necessary’ books were only the veneer.) This could be an entirely Discworld meme instead and I would’ve had no difficulty in filling it up at all.

What can I write about this series? I’ve often started and then backed away from trying to analyze it; I’ve tried to write fanfic and been hit by serious inferiority complex; and anyway, more or less all the intelligent people I know have read most of the books. I’m tempted to fill this post with pictures, since I love Paul Kidby‘s illustrations almost as much as I love the books themselves. (But if I begin with pictures, this post will never end.) Never have I suffered from a worse ‘literary anxiety’ than Pratchett’s Alzheimer’s. Never have I so constantly prayed that anyone should write one more book before he gives up for good. (The ‘one more book’ wish keeps being extended, of course. The next book — called Snuff — is to be published in October and I can hardly keep myself calm! A Vimes story! The cover is already out!) The day there will be no more Discworld to look forward to will be the day I’ll be truly, completely sad. Like all great anticipated tragedies, I try not to think about it or believe it will actually come.

When one is a literature student, three is a rather small number to make a book special. Even an entirely unappetizing book — once it turns up on the syllabus — has to be gone through in class, for an internal test and for the end-semester exams, and there goes three. So instead, here goes book that I feel like I have always read, even though the copy currently in my possession was a gift from the Cheshire Cat and the Cyber Monkey about two years ago.

That would be the edition, although I’ve been through the story and sub-stories at different places and over years, beginning from regular children’s illustrated books and Disney movie editions to the original play and the novels and about five or six films. I’ve written at least two term papers on it, and referred to it in several more. A favourite that will never grow old. :)