The year in books #12: The Hogfather

I have the rare pleasure of knowing two people who, in addition to being two of my very favorite human beings, also happen to be engaged to each other and to share an apartment. As you can imagine, this makes my social life so much more efficient than if these two wonderful persons were to live in separate domiciles that, were that the case, I would almost certainly introduce them in the hopes of sparking a monogamous - or at least shared domestic - arrangement. My last visit to their home was to eat lunch before hopping on a train to reunite with the other half of my own monogamous, domestic and, at the moment, actively reproductive romantic partnership in her ancestral hometown, and as I arrived, I realized that I had left the house completely bereft of literature.

These two friends of mine fortunately have quite the library, so I was not to be faced with the utterly unthinkable concept of a two-hour train ride unaccompanied by words. In fact, when I mentioned that I suddenly found myself in need of a book, I found myself being literally bombarded with literary works and rather felt the lack of an umbrella or at least a hardhat. As you will have gathered from the title of this post, the book I settled on was Terry Pratchett's The Hogfather.

I don't know how to tell you about Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. I have a hard time imagining that there are human beings left in the world who would enjoy Pratchett's blend of twisted fantasy, brilliant storytelling, sarcastic social commentary and enchanting language but have somehow managed not to read a single volume of the series, which I believe constitutes approximately 12% of the world's English-language fantasy novels. If you are both familiar with the Discworld and fond of it, The Hogfather is excellent. Death (I mean the character, though the phenomenon is also represented) is in it, and that's enough to sell me. If you are neither familiar with nor fond of Pratchett, I'd have a hard time recommending The Hogfather over any other Discworld novel - I haven't encountered one yet that didn't offer a splendid romp through a world that is difficult to compare to anything but a fantasy Douglas Adams and itself.

If you're familiar with Discworld and don't like it... well, I'm not really sure there's much to be done for you. I understand Dan Brown's books are quite nice.