Guards! Guards!

"Guards! Guards! is part of the Discworld book series . Terry Pratchett is – or was, I have to say, unfortunately – he was one of the most dynamic and beautiful writers I have ever read. Earlier I talked about turn of phrase: nobody, absolutely nobody, can play with words like Terry Pratchett. There’s a couple of quotes that I want to read, then we can talk about the book. They’re both from Guards! Guards! The food was good, solid stuff for a cold morning, all calories and fat and protein and maybe a vitamin crying softly because it was all alone. I love that. It’s so funny. And the other one: People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, “Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.” Look, I will never be the world’s greatest writer, and I don’t want to be. Quite honestly, I just want to get even remotely close to where Terry Pratchett was. Because I swear to God, nobody plays with words like he does. Guards! Guards! is from the point of view of the guards, the ones who are always killed off first – they’re like the redshirts in Star Trek. There’s intrigue, there’s dragons, there’s Errol the underdeveloped dragon… and the dialogue is snapping. It crackles and pops. It’s arguable, but I think it’s the best Discworld book. It’s the one that I’ve reread the most times – it’s just so good. The book was released in the 1980s; the fact that you can read it now and it feels like it could have been written today is just a mark of how wonderful Terry Pratchett was as an author. We lost a lot when he passed away. Yes! I doubt it’s the first time anybody did a perspective like that – here are the underlings – and obviously, there have been other books since then that have done something similar. But nobody can write it like Terry Pratchett. I mean, how many books are in the Discworld series? Forty? The fact that he was able to write that many books in a series and not get bored with his own work! Some are better than others, but there isn’t one that I’m just like: No, gross. For how many authors can you say that?"