I’m only 25 pages in and Lady Sybil has just received invitations to various balls and IS THIS A GODDAMN AUSTEN PARODY BECAUSE I AM VERY EXCITED. (No spoilers please, but I just needed to share enthusiasm with folks who would get it.)
I’m reading through Discworld one team at a time (I’ve read a smattering of books across teams before but now I’m getting systematic about it). Finished the Witches, now I’m nearing the end of the Watch and about halfway through THUD.
Every single Watch book (with the possible exception of GUARDS GUARDS, I honestly don’t remember) is on some level about prejudice — even if that’s not the central conflict, it’s the underlying theme that all of the characters are grappling with. And what I love is that, with the possible exception of Carrot, all of the good guys have to work at it. Sir Pterry shows his characters having the wrong thought first and correcting themselves, or doing what they know is the right thing even though a huge part of them doesn’t believe it, or only ever being imperfect in their grasp of equality (Vimes has prejudicial stereotypes for every race in A-M, but all Watchmen are equal and important).
I love this because I think it’s a very realistic depiction of what grappling with personal and systemic racism is like (hard! Cultural prejudices run deep! Doing the right thing is often easier than feeling the right way! Sometimes one has trouble putting aside their personal fragility to evaluate a systemic problem!), and still an unflagging argument for militant decency: we do the right thing, we work on ourselves, we expand the community, we expand our understanding of what people are, even though it’s hard because it’s right and decent to be so. And more to the point, I think it extends a lot of grace to its audience in that vein, by telling us that good people struggle to do good things, and we need not be perfect as long as we’re always working to be better than we’ve been.
We are currently on a cultural zeitgeist in the Western world that is heavily focused on identifying and abolishing prejudice, but modern society and social media culture in particular doesn’t extend a lot of grace and acknowledgment that people will often get things wrong before they learn to do them right (though this is already better than it was even ten years ago). Sir Pterry tells us it is our duty to be better, but being better is complicated and hard and we shouldn’t think too harshly of ourselves as long as we keep trying and improving.
Edit: typo.
Stolen from r/vintageads. I do wonder if there was a point in the creative process when Gideon was a straight-up revival preacher before the choice was made to make him a psychic instead.
In the very first chapter: “The Curious Squid were very small, harmless, difficult to find and reckoned by connoisseurs to have the foulest taste of any creature in the world. This made them very much in demand in a certain kind of restaurant where highly skilled chefs made, with great care, dishes containing no trace of the squid whatsoever.”
What? Why would the squid be in demand if they weren’t going to use it? I’m usually so good at Pratchett, but this is stumping me!