#i always miss dates like this
We get, rightfully imo, pretty sad and somber and naval-gazey about Discworld and Sir Terry on the 25th of May but I need everyone who might be discovering this series through this annual outpouring of love and sadness to know that these books are mostly just really fucking funny. Like, they’re heart-wrenching and poignant but really they can only pull that off because they’re also the funniest books ever written. There’s a line near the end of Hogfather that, when I read it, made me feel more deeply connected to, like, the concept of humanity then I ever have before, but the book was only able to deliver that because the rest of it is about what if Santa Claus got kidnapped and a Big Skeleton had to take over his job? It’s a patently ridiculous series but that is absolutely also where it’s power comes from.
night watch, the book that established the 25th of may as important, is a beautiful, riveting, and eye-opening novel about the horrors that are possible when ‘justice’ is seen as more important than rights, about how it’s okay to just fight to protect the precious things within your reach when there’s nothing you can do to save the world from falling apart, and about a man having to mourn people who aren’t dead yet because he knows he can’t save them. it’s also like 30% full of that man cringing at his younger self and has a bit where he destroys a siege weapon by shoving ginger up an ox’s ass.
