[gmw]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

[...]
Nah, that can't be it.

I'm glad you came to your senses. Fancy thinking we might have different tastes. Ha! The cheek of it!

Mind you, I am still glad you eventually came to like Pratchett.

His books tend to be sold/advertised for the humour (just look at many of the covers), but humour can be so personal that it is no big surprise his books do not work for everyone. But, as I recently noted to someone else, it is the serious side of Pratchett that keeps me coming back to him. The humour is the spice. In many instances the absurdities are what make this fantasy world seem real, and so what make the serious themes really work.

Neil Gaiman, who worked with Terry Pratchett on Good Omens, makes the observation:

[...]Some people have encountered an affable man with a beard and a hat. They believe they have met Sir Terry Pratchett. They have not. [...]

There is a fury to Terry Pratchett’s writing: it’s the fury that was the engine that powered Discworld. [...]

The anger is always there, an engine that drives.

And this reveals itself quite starkly in characters like Samuel Vimes or Granny Weatherwax. But I think it's there, too, albeit less blatant, in characters like The Patrician, Vetinari, who in one of the later books (Unseen Academicals, 2009) tells us this:

‘I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.’

But, having thrown various quotes out there, I think they demonstrate another reason why some readers might not enjoy his work. Some people don't much like Charles Dickens, because they find his work to be too preachy, that the themes and morals are too obvious in his work. I think the same might be said of Terry Pratchett; there is little doubt as to his values. Certainly there are things that he acknowledges as ambiguous, but there are things that obviously spark his emotions and these are often quite clear in the books.

Just sayin'.