How I first read Terry Pratchett

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I do plan to eventually review all off his Discworld books on this blog. Ok..to be honest, I am not qualified to evaluate his work. What I do want to do is, record my admiration for his work especially the Discworld series and if anyone apart from my wife and me ever read this blog, introduce his works to those who have not read it, in such a manner that they at least read one of his books to form an opinion.

So this blog is not about an specific book of his, or a bibliography of his work. If you want that, please visit ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld). This entry is about how I was introduced to his work and why I fell in love with it.

 This was a year back, when I had just been sent to London on a deputation, and one of our first guests  came to stay with us for a day or two while he was wrapping up some business here.

Well, I am notoriously bad at socialising and it takes me a month before I can actually say a hello to someone. Anyway, one evening, here was S and his wife ( also S) stuck with me (oddly another S) at home waiting for W to come home. I am a bad, OK lets make that pathetic , conversationalist, but they shared a passion with me for Batman, comics and graphic novels in general and we got talking. After discussing the impact of Frank Miller on Batman we cast our conversation around to different topics and that's when S ( aah you wonder which S?? the H or the W?? doesn't matter) mentioned Hogfather. This caught my interest, as I had seen posters for the BBC series on Hogfather in the Hyde Park Corner Tube station, and had no clue what it meant. That's when the story of Hogfather, and hence the works of Terry Pratchett were introduced to me by S and S. I was told how this was an amazing work of fiction, how there are many books each of which can be read independently and yet are all interconnected with each other, how the discworld has evolved through each book and how once a person reads just one book, they become hooked.

The next week I went to the library and picked out one of his books. I still remember the title - Soul Music. It was a satire cum history of rock music. The sheer humour of the book, the densely packed allusions and puns, and the amazingly detailed world stuck a chord in me, and before I knew it, I had become a fan.

So, I hope you pick up one of his books too and join the club.

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