Discussion
I'm eternally grateful for all the circumstances that lead to me getting to know and love Terry Pratchett in my youth.
At a time, when Harry Potter could have become part of my identity growing up, it became Discworld instead.
One day, my dad brought back home "Men at Arms" and gave it to me, and I got hooked.
[It made cutting all emotional ties to Rowling's work much easier]
[Not a new insight, but one I want to share; inspired by a post of a mutual]
@tomkalei made me lol :)
Yes, yes it is
@lavaeolus Soul Music was mine. 🥰
@lavaeolus I lost my fear of foreign languages with Sir Terry.
A friend lent me Men at Arms in German. I saw an unusual phrase and translated back to English in my head and recognized a wonderful pun.
Since that heureka-moment I read all text in the original language, if I know it. I try to extend this to movies, too.
@lavaeolus
I luckily got my kid started with the Tiffany Aching Series long before contact with Harry Potter.
My kid now probably has read most of the diskworld books and is re-reading some regularly.
(HP was read once, but it's not loved, and when my kid was old enough we discussed the problematic issues in these books and with the author. My kid has trans friends, so ...)
@lavaeolus I started reading Pratchett in '94. Men at Arms was the latest out, and I devoured all previous Discworld novels. Soul Music was the first I read immediately when it was published.
@jens for me it has to have been 2009/2010/2011 (I can't quite remember)
It may be a shock, but I wasn't yet born in 1994 :)
@lavaeolus Terrible shock. I will not recover. People weren't yet born in my youth? Truly outrageous! Because that would mean I'm old.
Anyway, let's not dwell on that.
It's funny in retrospect, because it means that I started reading Pratchett at a turning point in his writing. I tend to think of the Discworld before Men at Arms as particularly full of footnotes. From around there to, say, Carpe Jugulum, he seems to have improved his writing, which sadly also means he crammed fewer silly...
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@lavaeolus
To this day there is no more accurate documentation of how academia works than UU in Discworld.
Important work of non-fiction.