It's Still Magic, Even If You Know How It's Done

All of my books are out of my bookshelf right now, the main one downstairs, the good one you stack with your dress-up books to impress dates and intimidate the neighbors. I haven't given up on reading, it's just then when my old-ass washing machine tried to really impress me by pumping out way more water than it could possibly hold, I had to shortly thereafter decide to replace all my laminate flooring. The books came out and they're resting very comfortably, exploring whole new ways to collect dust in vertical stacks on some super 1990s built-in wall shelving along my staircase. The replacement flooring's been in for a couple of weeks, but a combination of physical laziness and... OK, no combination, just that... they're still there. Waiting.

Being the mildly OCD creature I am, the books will all go back in the same way, vaguely in descending order of pretension. The top-top shelf is excluded from this of course, because up there we keep the physically smaller books and other such things it would never occur to anyone to have to reach for. Remember I did go to graduate school, so just below that would go my Kant and Heidegger and Marx (oh, lots of Marx) and my smarty-pants history-of-history-as-a-subject books I may or may not have actually read when assigned, all followed by the remnants of my classical literature phase, religious studies and scriptures,* maybe a couple of literature-y novels, some home-improvement how-tos...** It's important to appear well-rounded, after all. You never know when Stephen Fry will be turning up for dinner.

The second to last shelf, one up from the floor, is reserved for my Terry Pratchett books. The whole shelf. It should be noted that this is expressly not for aesthetic purposes. I started reading them during a particularly tacky phase of a paperback reprinting cycle, using lots of "fun" colors and a wacky mismatch font on cover and spine, you know to emphasize the oh-you-rascal red-nose-honking probably going on between the covers!! So they look bad. Plus, try bringing a grown woman home for the first time only to have her stop dead at that shelf where you have to explain that it's "a series of fantasy novels I'm really in to." As far as third-date deal-closers go, that's right up there with "syphilis" and "coat made of human skin."

But they stayed there. I have options. There's a whole other bookshelf upstairs, exactly the same Ikea-standard size, shape and faux-woodgrain, tucked away in the hide-able safety of my bedroom, loaded down with camouflaging family pictures and collected tchotchkes. It's where I keep my Tolkien books, my graphic novels, my self-help books and school books I didn't like but didn't have the heart to sell back at the end of the quarter I was forced to buy them in. You know, the stuff that waters down your projected intellectual bravado with undeniable proof of your true, unfocused, weakling profligacy.

No, the Pratchett books stay in the public area. They do so because they aren't about what I want to portray to anyone else. They are, first and always, only about what I want to portray about me to me.

I hated Terry Pratchett the first time I'd read one of his books. I'd actually resisted for a long time, because I knew what would happen and then it happened: he'd stolen my words from me. I'd been stewing for a bit then about writing something, something that combined the things that informed my imagination the most, the Tolkien and post-Tolkien fantasy of my youth and the dissecting razor of satire from my burgeoning, overeducated adulthood. I write this way, on a blog like this, because I don't do large-project stories all that well, but I'd been hammering at something for a while. I got up to 60,000 words or so, an achievement of (up to then and now since) unparalleled ambition and accomplishment in this direction for me. Then I read The Colour of Magic and stopped working, maybe not immediately, but not long afterward.

Whatever I'd been trying to achieve, he'd already done it. And done it at a level I was nowhere close to approaching. The jokes were faster and sharper. The satire was infinitely deeper. The scope was wider, the characters were clearer, even the footnotes, Jesus, the goddamned footnotes...

It was like I'd had this map to a X-marked spot on a desert island somewhere, only to arrive and find there was not only already someone there, but they were on a floating chair in the infinity pool at the middle of the giant resort-estate they'd built with the treasure when they'd found it 25 years before.

Instead of staying mad, I just kept reading. And that was a chore because that motherfucker seemed to actually write faster than even my appetite for it could keep up, which is saying something. I said this elsewhere, but unlike anyone else, the voice he wrote in matched most closely the voice I hear in my head.

I carried that voice through all of his writings, through my late 20s and into the subsequent decade(s), through a whole marriage and divorce. When I stayed home to raise my kids, I'd read at their nap-time, always alternating, one difficult book followed by a Pratchett one to clear out the struggle; the familiar thrum of fraternal resonance echoing inside my skull with every manic set-piece or throwaway gag line. Without Pratchett, I wouldn't have been able to manage Nietzsche or Tocqueville or Homer.

And when the kids got older, I lent him my own voice when I read his Tiffany Aching books aloud to them. Four books' worth of deliberately misheard English folklore told to three American boys, long-form stories where the unambiguous hero is a nine-year-old (and subsequently older in the sequels) girl learning to be a witch. It's among the best memories we have. Maybe it was the tales themselves. Maybe it was the opportunity to trot out a wide array of terrible Scottish accents.

Whenever someone starts a sentence "You know, the word 'genius' is used to much these days..." they are 100% about to overuse it in the way they'd just warned us about. I don't know that Terry Pratchett was a genius. He wasn't great at endings. He was often too coy with plot points, torturing out reveals with deliberate obfuscation. His early Discworld books can be a bit thin and joke-y at points. But there was never not something shockingly funny or diabolically inventive in all of them. And somewhere in there--maybe it was Guards! Guards!, or maybe it was Mort, who knows--he hit this stride...

All modern fantasy rips off Tolkien. We know this. I love Tolkien, to an almost shameful degree, but Tolkien was a fanboy. Not of fantasy, of languages. Word nerd, for real. His books are pastiches of northern European national-epic poetry, fit together with the absolutism of earnestness and zeal that leaves little or no room for a decent dick joke. Or even a poor one. And because Tolkien is the template, almost all fantasy that followed aped his fanboy core motivation, only now the writers were a generation or more behind and were specifically Tolkien fanboys. Pratchett undid all that. He showed it was possible to stay in one place--speaking of the genre--and still move the fuck on.

There's plenty to love Terry Pratchett for. I found out he died today when I was at work in the morning. I held it together, but it wasn't the easiest thing I've ever tried to metabolize in a professional setting. Even now, I'm not completely sure it's a thing. All I can really seem to do is write in ever-widening, jaggedy circles about it, hoping to stumble on a phrase or a metaphor that gets across what this feels like, the death of a person I've never met. This many words in, it seems unlikely to come. This weekend the books will go back, onto the same shelf, in the same order and I can go ahead and be heartbroken now that I'll never have to worry about running out of space.



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*For balance. I mean physically. They tend to level out with the more academical tracts. Plus, usually very attractive spines.

**Lovingly preserved by un-use. Make me an offer!