Terry Pratchett is a name I’ve heard over the years but not someone I had read before. When I saw that one of my favorite writers Neil Gaiman had worked with Pratchett, I decided to check him out. The Carpet People caught my eye and so I brought it home from the library — first as the audio read by Tony Robinson and then checking out the book when I could not listen fast enough. The illustrations by the author were a marvelous bonus to the print version.
I loved his language. As we listened and drove to Lake Tipsoo, Robinson read: “The carpet was big. But the carpet was…everything. It didn’t count. It was too big to have a size. But the High Gate Land was small enough to be really huge.” And the High Gate Land turns out to be a penny.
I adored the idea of teensy tiny people living in the carpet at the mercy of Fray which, as far as I can tell, is what happens when we beyond giants step on a section of carpet.
In an author’s note, Pratchett says that the “book has two authors, they were both the same person.” He originally wrote it when he was seventeen and then revised it considerably at 43. I’m intrigued by how well he did at 17 and then how far he’s come since then.
Bits flew off in different directions and, at times, I noticed the fact that the first author was only 17. It made me want to see how his writing develops and check into this Discworld business. I’m betting I’ll be impressed and may need to find another reader to do the English accents that my inner reading voice so often falters on when I look at the print version.
