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Episode image is a detail from the cover of Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, published in 1993 by Corgi Books; cover illustration by Josh Kirby.
Taking a few minutes away from recording Page One In Review episodes, Charles Adrian talks about a particular kind of convalescent literature.
“Unlike wizards, who like nothing better than a complicated hierarchy, witches don’t go in much for the structured approach to career progression. It’s up to each individual witch to take on a girl to hand the area over to when she dies. Witches are not by nature gregarious, at least with other witches, and they certainly don’t have leaders.
Granny Weatherwax was the most highly-regarded of the leaders they didn’t have.”
You can read about Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Series on Wikipedia here.
The first Page One In Review episode, which is Page One 157, was recorded on the 18th of March, 2020.
Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith is discussed in Page One 76 and Page One 175, Germany by Neil MacGregor is discussed in Page One 177, The Cloudspotter’s Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney is discussed in Page One 27 and Page One 163, and Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary by M. R. James is discussed in Page One 36 and Page One 165.
Also mentioned in this episode is London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd. Another book by Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor, is discussed in Page One 121.
There are also mentions in this episode of books by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and P. D. James, the Culture Series by Iain M. Banks and the Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia E. Butler (of which Imago is the third book).
Other books by Terry Pratchett mentioned in this episode are The Colour Of Magic, Equal Rites, Mort, Reaper Man and Weird Sisters.
The Colour Of Magic by Terry Pratchett is discussed in Page One 73 and another book by Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, which is co-authored by Neil Gaiman, is discussed in Page One 140.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 9th September, 2020.
Episode released: 6th October, 2020.
Book listing:
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
Links:
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 181st Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is not a Page One In Review episode. It's not a Second Hand Book Factory episode. It's not even really a full episode. I just wanted to talk for a few minutes about some books that have been giving me a lot of pleasure over the last few weeks - as they have done at several different times in my past: Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.
So I've been recording these Page One In Review episodes, in which I go through all of the books that I've been given by guests on the podcast, for a few months now. I think I started... I haven't looked up the date but it was sometime in March, wasn't it? And we're now... it's the 9th of September today. So that's about six months and a bit. Probably. And today I was supposed to record the - well, “supposed to” - I had intended to record the next Page One In Review episode, which would have been the 25th Page One In Review - I mean, I'll do it tomorrow instead or next week or I don't know when I'll do it but it's not pressing - but in any case, I have been preparing to record that episode and thinking about the books that I'm going to talk about and writing things down on Post-It notes. And today I just... I didn't feel like actually recording it.
And instead I thought what... yeah, what I might talk about is something that I've mentioned on these episodes before, which is - well, two things really: First, the fact that I haven't been reading very much over the last few months. And, you know, I have said - for those of you who've listened to all of these episodes you'll know - there are books that I've read. I read Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith quite early on in the whole... you know, after the pandemic hit. I read Neil MacGregor's Germany very slowly. There are other books... Oh, The Cloudspotters Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, which is still on my kitchen table. I've got, kind of, stalled actually. I read... I reread quite a lot of that but haven't finished it. Then there are a couple of other books that I haven't mentioned: I'm reading Peter Ackroyd's Biography Of London, which is... [laughing] which is wonderful but, yeah, that's in the bathroom - I read that a paragraph at a time. And by my computer - very important book - I have M. R. James's Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary, which I've talked about on a previous Page On In Review episode. It was given to me by Tim Wells during one of the original... yeah, for... I think it was the first... one of the episodes in the first season of Page One he gave me that book. And I have that by the computer just so that when a file is taking a long time to load or if it's buffering or if... you know, if it's taking a while to export, I just have... you know, I have something that I can look at and I read a couple of paragraphs of that to entertain myself.
So I am still... I am still reading but, I mean, what have I mentioned - four or five books there over six months? That's... You know, for me, that is... it's akin to starvation. I... I am somebody who read and I think of myself as somebody who reads. It's part of my self-definition. You know, I am Homo legendus - I don't... [laughing] I don't know if that's the... if that would be the correct Latin but... You know, during most of my life, I have had more than one book on the go and I... and I read voraciously. Not as voraciously as some people I know but nevertheless it's a huge part of how I have spent my time and it's... it's something that I have got a huge amount of enjoyment from.
And so that's the first thing: the fact that I haven't been reading very much during this pandemic time. I think I've been too anxious about all of the things that are happening in the world - not just the pandemic but all kinds of other horrors.
And then the second thing that... that I was thinking about was this notion of convalescent literature, which I've talked about before also during these episodes. I've talked about it in the context of murder mystery novels. And I love murder mystery but I don't have an awful lot of them, I realise, in novel form. I tend to listen to them. I... You know, I have an Audible subscription. I'm sorry, it's an Amazon company but nevertheless I just... I love listening to people reading things and I particularly love listening to people reading whoddunnits and murder mystery books.
So that is something that I have been doing a lot of during this time. I've been listening to a lot of Agatha Christie recently and, well, I've been rude about Agatha Christie in the past, generally based on second hand information. She... Yeah, she may not use a huge number of different words but she's a good storyteller and she makes me laugh out loud at times. I've also been listening to adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers novels and I listen... I listen and re-listen to P. D. James novels on Audible. And then other things - sci fi and fantasy generally: the Culture Series by Iain M. banks, Octavia Butler's... oh what's that trilogy called? One of them's called Imago but I don't remember if that's the name of the...
Anyway. The point is... So I've been listening to books, including whodunnits, but I haven't been reading whodunnits because I don't have very many and a few weeks ago I thought: “Oh, do you know what I could read, what would be excellent convalescent literature for me? Something that gives me a huge amount of pleasure and doesn't demand a lot would be Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.” I've read them all at least twice and some of them I've read more than twice. I first started reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels when I was at school - when I was a teenager. I got them out of the school library. I must have read... yeah, I don't... The Colour Of Magic, Equal Rites, Mort, Reaper Man, Weird Sisters for sure.
Anyway. [laughing] The point is, I... as a teenager - this isn't the point but this is something else I wanted to say: As a teenager I was a little bit embarrassed that I loved reading Terry Pratchett so much. I thought of those books as escapism and I think I'd also probably heard from teachers that escapism was bad - or at least you had to look out for it because the important thing was self-improvement. I now no longer think that self-improvement and enjoyment are mutually exclusive. In fact, I think that they... they go together - I think you can't really have one without the other.
But... yeah. I... So I love them because they're also easy to read. They're full of wonderful ideas. They are full of allusions to other books and ideas and stories which, if you don't know the other books and ideas and stories, you won't notice that those allusions are being made - they don't feel... these books don't feel pretentious, they don't feel exclusionary. There are jokes that I didn't get when I was a teenager and I spot them now and find them very funny but that doesn't mean that I didn't find the books very funny when I was a teenager. There are probably things that I spotted when I was a teenager that I don't spot now that I'm, you know, heading towards forty-one years old.
Now. So. But all of that aside - that's just me talking about how much I love these Discworld novels - I started reading Small Gods last night, which... I mean, I don't have a favourite of these Discworld novels but Small Gods is [laughing] one of the favourites that I don't have. There's a joke for people who read Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. And, yeah, this is a great... this is a great book about belief and fanaticism. And one of the - oh, I mean, there are so many... there... there are levels to Terry Pratchett's jokes. One of the jokes in this novel is that there is a sect - a religious sect - of people on this... on this planet, which is the Discworld - and the Discworld, you need to know, is a flat world. It's completely flat like a pizza and it sits on the back of four elephants that stand on the shell of a giant turtle which moves through space. And we know that because the narrator tells us in several books. In fact, quite a few of the books open with a description of the World Turtle A'Tuin moving through space with the Discworld on its back. And in this book, this sect - the Omnians - believe, falsely, that the world is round, which is... which is obviously ludicrous within this... within the, you know, this Discworld system. And I love that. I think that's a really nice joke. I d... Yeah. [laughing] I can't even... I don't even have the brainpower to expand on that, but it's just so nice. And there are many, many other just wonderful things in this book.
I have other favourites, by the way. This isn't my only favourite of the Discworld novels. But I had forgotten how delightful the opening is and I just wanted to read... So all of that chat that I've just done - I don't even know how long I've been chatting for - is so that I can read you the first page and a bit of this novel.
This is a Corgi paperback. This one is actually from 1993 I think... Yeah. I don't suppose I bought it in 1993. I think I probably bought it in 2002. I... When I was at university I won an essay prize and the prize was a book token and I spent half the book token on paperback editions of all of the Terry Pratchett novels that then existed. And when I finished my final exams I put all of the books in the back of my car - which was a Mini Cooper... old-style Mini Cooper so they pretty much filled the boot of the car - and I drove to Ireland and then drove across Ireland and ... yeah, I had a lovely holiday. And I read... I just read Terry Pratchett. I didn't... I couldn't imagine wanting to read anything else. I'd spent four years of my undergraduate degree reading for exams - as well as for pleasure but I had to read... you know, a lot of books that I read were not read because I was choosing to read them but because I was going to answer exam questions about them. And so I think a... yeah, an experience a lot of people have when they do a literature degree - or a semi-literature degree - as mine was is that they don't want to read anything once they've done their exams. And so I didn't want to read anything but not reading anything for me at that time meant reading Terry Pratchett. As now.
So what was I...? Sorry. Corgi. This is a Corgi [laughing] paperback. Oh goodness, I just am talking talking. Corgi paperback. It's 381 pages long. It's such a pleasing book to hold, and to read. And this is the first... so the first... it's actually on pages 5 and 6. But here we go, this is the opening to Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. Oh, shall I [laughing] tell you? It's the twelfth Discworld novel.
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.
And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger.
And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert and it will leap...
And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle.
And then the eagle lets go.
And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There's good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there's much better eating on practically anything else. It's simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises.
But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.
One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.
I love that. [laughing] I just gives me so much pleasure. “Everybody knows why the tortoise does this.” [laughs] That... It just... It makes me laugh. I love it. It's so good. It's so funny. It's a beautiful opening. It's so soft and so [laughing] interesting and his turn of phrase I think is just gorgeous. And it is also an image that is central to this book about, as I say, belief and fanaticism. Yeah. So good. So good!
So that is... yeah, that's my convalescent literature. I've been... I've been reading my way through those and they've been giving me a lot of pleasure over the last few weeks. And they will, I'm sure, continue to do so over the next few weeks and months. I'm not sure how long it will take me to read all of the novels. I... Yeah, I haven't... I haven't actually counted them up but there are over twenty and there might even be thirty of them. I'm trying to sneak a look at them on my bookshelf here beside me, but I'm not going to [breathes in and sighs out] count them. No, let's count... I'll count them. Yeah... wa... hang on. Just... You won't even notice that I'm doing this but I'm going to take a moment to count them: [whispering and getting fainter] One, two, three...
[short silence]
So I think - if I haven't miscounted - there are thirty-eight. And I'm on twelve. So I've still got... yeah, I've got a few to go. Good.
Thank you for listening to this. This has been a strange episode, hasn't it? A strange, rambling, digressive, unplanned episode about a book that is neither a second hand book nor has somebody given it to me. Totally off theme... off brand. But... yeah, I don't care. It's a... It's a... It's... yeah. It's important to me.
Thank you. Yeah, I've said that - thank you for listening. Be well. Look after yourselves. And very soon I will record the next Page One In Review episode - Page One In Review 25.... yeah, which is going to be a good one. I promise. Okay. Bye.
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast, please go to pageonepodcast.com.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]