reading the biography of an author I don't like

[calimac]

Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes by Rob Wilkins (Doubleday, 2022)

The most useful thing I learned from this book is that I'm not the only person out there who doesn't like Terry Pratchett's fiction. His own mother refused to read any of the gift copies she was given, and once when the driver of a car she was in put on a Pratchett audiobook, she almost immediately reached over from the passenger seat and turned it off.

Once when Pratchett was in Hollywood, he attended a screening of the not-yet-released movie Shrek. To my mind, Shrek is the perfect animated comedy, but Pratchett didn't care for it. That's appropriate, or at least symmetrical: I don't like what he thought was funny, and he didn't like what I think is funny.

Clearly we had very different senses of humor, because I find his writing desperately failing at a quest to be humorous. However! In this book I found a Pratchett joke that actually made me laugh, first of its kind. As a 17-year-old tyro journalist, Pratchett was assigned to write his paper's children's page, and he filled it with wacky inventions, including the story of a Welsh shepherd named Bedwyr and his sheepdog, Bedwetter.

OK, that was funny.

Comments

[cmcmck]

I find Pratchett deep and thoughtful in some ways although there are things that amuse me and say 'oh yes, he saw that film' or 'he read that book'.

And occasionally I find him laught out loud funny.

[redbird]

I'm wondering why you bothered to read this: I wouldn't read the biography of a writer or artist whose work I didn't like unless either the person was notorious, or I had enjoyed the biographer's previous work.

[calimac]

"notorious", without the negative connotations of that word, is the reason. Pratchett looms large in the fantasy field, regardless of my opinion of his work, and I thought it would be useful to know more about him. Sarcasm in my opening paragraph ("The most useful thing I learned ...") aside, it was indeed informative, and there was very little requiring the reader to know the fiction.

[athenais]

I thought that was an excellent biography. I was not aware, until I read it, that I'd always assumed he wasn't a particularly "nice" person and lo, he was not. Kind of the way most comedians turn out to be real pills when they're not playing the part of a jolly joke-telling person.

I am also halfway through a reread of all the Discworld books and while I still like them well enough I am not keeping them once I'm done. I can't help but think he writes as if he were getting paid by the word.