Equal Rites

Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett is a novel that I would love to go back and read slowly. Being a big fan of the Pratchett and Gaiman novel Good Omens, which is written in a style that reminds me very much of Equal Rites, all I wanted while reading this was more time to enjoy the dry, sarcastic humor and casual sentence structure, both of which are some of my favorite literary devices, especially the sentence structure. When a novel feels like someone's thoughts, or conversation, it connects with me much more than it would if it were written like a stuffy high school paper. This is pretty obvious; most people prefer casual writing to something stiff, but Pratchett's work is different in that it's both fluid and choppy, and I can't ignore that. His humor also gets to me right off the bat. For example, when he talks about the goats looking up at the wizard with mild interest. This sort of sentence could be found in anything, and we'd accept it because the whole “mild interest” phrase is used so frequently. But then, Pratchett adds that 'it doesn't take much to interest goats', and bam, you've gotten me to laugh. The entire novel is written this way, which, again, reminds me of Pratchett's co-authored Good Omens, one of my favorite lines from that book having to do with how the estimated date of the creation of Earth was off by nearly a quarter of an hour. While I greatly appreciate Pratchett's use of humor, I can see how it wouldn't appeal to everyone. For example, even during the more “serious” passages, Pratchett manages to sneak in a sentence about how “Esk nodded like a concerned rabbit”, and that mental picture alone is so ridiculous, that we end up smiling to ourselves again. Regardless, I thought that this novel was witty and interesting, and certainly something I'd like to reread in the future.