Throwback Thursday: Discworld

I started reading Discworld, a series of over forty books, sometime in high school. I can’t say how or why I got into them, but the author, Terry Pratchett, died quite recently, so I wanted to reflect on my time reading his books. The books are comedic fantasies; enormous, interconnected, and all but impossible to read in order. I tried, though. I was so careful to figure out exactly how they went, and somehow I ended up starting with the second book.

I’ve never been good at doing things the way I’m supposed to.

The night Terry Pratchett died, my roommate and I blew off homework to watch a movie based on one of his books — our own special kind of mourning. Now I am rereading one book about each of the main sets of characters in remembrance of him.

But that’s sad. Let’s talk about the fun things. There’s the Disc, where everyone lives, on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle who swims through space. And, of course, my many favorite characters — Death, the most adorable character on the Disc, who talks in caps lock. Carrot, a six foot, three inch-tall dwarf. Stanley, a human raised by peas. An army regiment made up entirely of girls disguised as boys. The Librarian, who is also an orangutan. Discworld is fun, more than anything. It comes with goofy footnotes and everything. But it’s so much more than silly.

I can count on one hand all of the books that have ever made me cry. One of them was part of the Discworld series. There’s an unexpected poignancy here, along with political commentary and the mocking (probably affectionate) of every classic and cliché in existence. Something about these books makes you want to do more with your life. It’s often a quote from Death, but sometimes a passing comment from a side character or a beautiful bit of imagery — small things that make you think without even realizing it at first.

Unfortunately, most of my life is spent trying to finish the series, so I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to doing anything more with my life than that.

Discworld is easy. That’s the thing. It’s not some big classic academic book you pore through for hours. You read it to have fun. You bond with other people who are reading it for the same reasons. You don’t think about it. But one day you wake up and realize that you have friends you never expected to have, and you see the world in slightly different ways. This random historical event was actually pretty stupid. Rock music and soccer are really powerful. Sometimes good witches look bad, and sometimes a stray dog is the only one that can save you. Discworld made it easier, I think, for me to take things as they are and hold onto myself, and just keep going. It’s made me more willing to take my lessons from unexpected sources.

That realization came to me on the day Terry Pratchett died, hand in hand with the realization that it was over. There will never be a new story about Discworld. But books keep going. It’s important to mourn the people we lose. But to mourn the things they might have given us sometime in the future? That’s selfish. I have better things to do. I was just about to start the story of Death’s granddaughter, Susan.