lightreads | Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sorry, we're gonna be all 'me me me me' here for a minute.

July was terrible. Terrible. So terrible that my entire reaction to what was, quite possibly, an ocular stroke was a slow blink and to keep quiet about it for a week. By rights, it should have had me post traumatic stressing so hard, you'd need a trowel to scrape me off the ceiling, but it turns out I'd used up all of that and then some on the fun episode of 'is the cancer metastasizing?' the universe helpfully scheduled for my single vacation this year. (Answer: no. But it turns out that, to certain portions of my brain, the actual outcome was irrelevant.)

So then of course I got sick. I don't get sick much, so on those occasions I do, I really do it up right. Coughing up strange substances, full-body trembling for days, you know, the fun stuff. And somewhere in there, when I was lying on my office floor for five minutes because it just looked so amazingly comfy, I decided I was going to read some godamn Discworld.

My point is, people say it's difficult to read this book when it's not Christmas time, or if you are a person who doesn't have strong Christmas feelings. It was July, and I do not have the sort of Christmas feelings they mean. Christmas is a thing I endure, let's put it that way. So actually, it turned out, reading this book at the end of terrible, terrible July was brilliant. Everything was awful, so it was just like Christmas!

So anyway, you can see how this book's opening three-quarters of froth and vaguely plot-related nonsense was soothing, and then how the sudden tautening in the last quarter caught me by surprise, and drew me in, and held me, and talked to me about how if you milled the universe down to its component atoms and inspected all of them, not a one would be an atom of justice or mercy, but how we can make them anyway, with the component parts of belief. And you can see how Susan holding a poker and saying it kills only monsters made my chest seize up a little, because oh, what I wouldn't do with one of those.

Thanks, Terry Pratchett. This book needed at least two more drafts, but you haven't gotten me like that in a while.

It's August now. August will be better.

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