Terry Pratchett

I'm sure it's not news to anyone by now that Terry Pratchett has died. When I found out yesterday, I put my computer away and spent the rest of the day disconnected from everything except my little family here. I cried, and I took a nap, and I did a lot of reading. In fact, that's what I did most of today, too, until Swicky accidentally broke one of my favorite coffee mugs and I had to go online to order a replacement. I figured, while I was online, I might as well write up my thoughts on the death of one of my very favorite authors.

I don't remember who handed my my first Terry Pratchett novel. It may have been my uncle, who had a large collection of fantasy and sci-fi books in his apartment. It may have been a librarian - I had a tendency to pester them for books they didn't believe I was old enough to read yet. It may have been my mother, with whom the Discworld was a shared land to escape to while doing dishes or sitting out in the yard.

The first one I read was The Colour of Magic, which is the first of the series, but I read them entirely out of order after that. I read whichever ones I could get my hands on, and I read them multiple times. Granny Weatherwax was a favorite of mine - I want to be her when I get old, although with more cats - and, of course, the Librarian is a hero of mine, but Death was always my favorite character. I read them out loud to my mom sometimes, and then we'd switch, and she'd take up the story and read out loud for a while. I know we went through Witches Abroad and Lords and Ladies that way; there were others, but those are the ones that stick in my mind. Last year, I went through and read every single Terry Pratchett Discworld novel, in order. It was awesome, and didn't take me nearly as long as I had thought it would. They were fun to read, and I never got bogged down in the series - each book felt new and exciting. I read them all, and now I'm waiting to read his last book, not yet published, the 41st Discworld novel, which features the very young and magnificent Tiffany Aching.

41 books in the series, and I'm not ready for it to end. And I'm not going to write anymore tonight, because I'm crying again, so I'm going to take my tea and find another book and read some more. But I'll end my post with Terry Pratchett's last tweets, which made me laugh and cry and were just perfect:


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