He is dissatisfied with hunting practices he considers barbaric, and after a confrontation with his father, heads towards Lancre, intending to become a witch. Geoffrey, the third son of Lord Swivel, is well educated, vegetarian and a pacifist. When Granny Weatherwax, Tiffany's mentor, dies, she leaves everything to Tiffany, who becomes the first among equals of the witches. Jeannie, the Kelda of the Nac Mac Feegle, is worried that she's overworked. Tiffany Aching is busy running her steading and taking care of the people of the Chalk. In early June 2015, Pratchett's daughter Rhianna Pratchett announced that The Shepherd's Crown would be the last Discworld novel, and that no further work, including unfinished work, would be published. It was published in the United Kingdom on 27 August 2015 by Penguin Random House publishers, and in the United States on 1 September 2015. It is the 41st novel in the Discworld series, and the fifth based on the character Tiffany Aching.
On the contrary, I am crushed by how many books I have not read.The Shepherd's Crown is a comic fantasy novel, the last book written by Terry Pratchett before his death in March 2015.
I am not saying this as a complacent book snob who claims to have read everything. By dissolving the difference between serious and light reading, our culture is justifying mental laziness and robbing readers of the true delights of ambitious fiction.īecause life really is too short to waste on ordinary potboilers. Everyone reads trash sometimes, but why are we now pretending, as a culture, that it is the same thing as literature? The two are utterly different.Īctual literature may be harder to get to grips with than a Discworld novel, but it is more worth the effort. Their books, like all great books, can change your life, your beliefs, your perceptions. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury.
A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. In the age of social media and ebooks, our concept of literary greatness is being blurred beyond recognition. I don’t mean to pick on this particular author, except that the huge fuss attending and following his death this year is part of a very disturbing cultural phenomenon.
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