Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes by Rob Wilkins (Doubleday, 2022)
The most useful thing I learned from this book is that I'm not the only person out there who doesn't like Terry Pratchett's fiction. His own mother refused to read any of the gift copies she was given, and once when the driver of a car she was in put on a Pratchett audiobook, she almost immediately reached over from the passenger seat and turned it off.
Once when Pratchett was in Hollywood, he attended a screening of the not-yet-released movie Shrek. To my mind, Shrek is the perfect animated comedy, but Pratchett didn't care for it. That's appropriate, or at least symmetrical: I don't like what he thought was funny, and he didn't like what I think is funny.
Clearly we had very different senses of humor, because I find his writing desperately failing at a quest to be humorous. However! In this book I found a Pratchett joke that actually made me laugh, first of its kind. As a 17-year-old tyro journalist, Pratchett was assigned to write his paper's children's page, and he filled it with wacky inventions, including the story of a Welsh shepherd named Bedwyr and his sheepdog, Bedwetter.
OK, that was funny.
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