Small Gods: 02/14/07

Terry Pratchett has written more than thirty-five Discworld books. Of the lot I've ready maybe a dozen. I read Colour of Magic the year it was first published and some how completely missed that the book had become a series. Even though I introduced Ian to Pratchett's books he has read significantly more of the series than I have.

I decided to read Small Gods after hearing it performed on Radio 4 and a copy came my way via BookCrossing. I'm glad I heard the audio version first because I found the jumps between scenes hard to follow at times. The lack of chapter breaks also made pacing myself more difficult (and is one of the reasons why I haven't read as many Pratchett books as Ian).

After having suffered through The Silver Chair, Small Gods was like an antidote to all the preachy rhetoric of the previous book. It was a nice parody of the extremes of religion set against the philosophy cum geekery. In the middle of all of this is a once great god reduced to the status of "small god" and trapped in the body of a tortoise. It is Om's view of the war (and the world) between Omnia and Ephebe and his conversations with Brutha that really make this book funny.

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