Mort, Reaper Man, and Soul Music by Terry Pratchett

[lightreads]

Death is not a person; he’s an anthropomorphic personification. And he’s pretty emo, if you ask me. In Mort Death takes an apprentice, and then a holiday. In Reaper Man Death has an existential crisis and takes a holiday. And in Soul Music Death’s granddaughter has an existential crisis while Death takes a holiday.

See, I needed to read Discworld while I was studying for finals, and while these books suffer grievously for the lack of Sam Vimes, I did come around eventually to be a Death convert. He likes kittens, you know.

But these weren’t quite the books I was expecting. They were funny, of course, if a bit drier than the Watch books I’m used to. And it’s not like the Watch books are all hilarity all the time, but the Death books are startlingly, well, sad sometimes. People die -- I mean duh, right? -- and sometimes it’s awful and often they really don’t want to go. My favorite of the lot was Reaper Man which was both hilarious and painfully melancholy. Because as Pratchett says, “you have to dance both. Otherwise you can’t dance either.”

Good winter reading, as it turns out.

Comments

[grievous-angel.livejournal.com]

I am a huge, huge Discworld fan (hence the shock over Pratchett's recent diagnosis of Alzheimer's) and although Sam Vimes remains a true hero of mine - I will fight my corner against anybody in the argument that he is one of the great heroes of literature - I adore, adore, adore Death. He is a deeply funny character. And any entity who a horse called Binkie is okay by me!