My Head Is Full of Books: A chain reaction leads to...

"Outside a dog a book is man's best friend, inside a dog it is too dark to read!" -Groucho Marx========="The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." -Jane Austen========="I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book."-JK Rowling========"I spend a lot of time reading." -Bill Gates=========“Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.” -Jacqueline Kelly=========

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

A chain reaction leads to...

It is one of those things that led to this and that and finally dumped me out here.

Let me explain.

Today a girl checked out her second Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett

She seemed pretty excited about it and so I showed her the map of all the Discworld novels and what comes after/before what. It is very confusing. She and I pondered it for a minute and decided that it probably doesn't matter which novel she reads next. They all seem to work back to each other.

I showed her a photocopy of this reading map

After she left the library I thought about Terry Pratchett and what a pity it is that he is gone and there will be no new Discworld novels to entertain us again. Of course that is silly of me to get all sentimental since I've only read two of the Discworld novels, both from the Tiffany Aching sub series (the purple YA blocks on the diagram.) And I didn't read those in order either. If I really cared I should be running to the shelves to pick up The Color of Magic, a good starting book for the series.

Still thinking of Terry Pratchett and his Discworld series as I drove home, I wondered if other people would like listening to the audio of The Shepherd's Crown, his last novel, if they hadn't read anything else by him. My thoughts had wandered to audiobooks because I was mentally compiling a list of my recent favorites.

As I walked into the house I instantly went to my computer to locate a blog post I wrote about my favorite audiobooks of 2015. On that post I had added links to audio files of all the books. As I listened to the clip of The Shepherd's Crown narrated by Stephen Briggs I was struck by this question, Was Briggs the narrator of all Pratchett's Discworld novels?

I never did find out the answer to that question, though I think the answer is yes. But I don't really care anymore because I found this wonderful tribute to Pratchett by Briggs. Please watch it. It is only 5 minutes and quite magical. The narrator speaks...

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs became great friends as they worked on so many projects together. It makes me smile to think about collaborations. Check out Stephen Briggs' website.

See how it goes? One student innocently checks out a book.

Then I think about the author and the narrator of his audiobooks on and off all day.
I dig around to find out some answers.

This is my favorite kind of research.