The joys of stepping outside your comfort zone ...

... and discovering everyone was right after all!

For years people have been telling me about this Terry Pratchett fellow, giving him nothing but the highest praise. But, well he writes sort of science fiction / fantasy stuff doesn't he, I'd say with curled lip. That's not really my kind of thing you know. Well I've started listening to the unabridged audio versions of his Discworld series, and I'm loving them. They are wonderfully funny satires with a large cast of fabulous characters. My favourite is the Librarian at the Unseen University - he has some of the best lines!

I've 'read' the first 3 so far, The Colour of Magic, Light Fantastic, and Equal Rites, and am about to start the 4th, Mort. The reader for the first two was Nigel Planer (the hippy Neil from The Young Ones), and his voice was perfect. Equal Rites was read by Celia Imrie, an excellent actor whose work I admire, but it took me a while to get over my disappointment that it wasn't Nigel again. Equal Rites is about a young girl striving to be the first female wizard, and all the main characters are female, so it was more appropriate that it was read by a female reader, but I still had this niggling feeling all the way through that it wasn't as good as the first two. I was pleased to see that Nigel Planer is back for Mort.

This got me to wondering whether I prefer Nigel's reading because he is better, or just because I heard him first. I think Nigel has an inherently funny voice, and is able to inject just the right note of sarcasm into his words.

Anyway, I'm loving these stories, and I can heartily recommend them, even if like me you think you don't like sci fi/fantasy. I'm now determined to work my way through the whole series, and luckily there are quite a lot of them.