First Lines Friday – 11/02/2022
Hello and welcome to today’s First Lines Friday post! First Lines Friday is a regular series in which I take the opportunity to share the opening introductions of a multitude of books. These may be books I’ve already read, are looking to read, or even just a little bit intrigued about.
For today’s post I decided to keep my options wide open. I’ve been thinking about a particular author quite a lot this week, and so I’ve decided to feature one of his books today.
Can you guess what today’s featured book is from the intro?
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn’t bothered to sweep up pieces.
This is the gulf between universes, the chill deeps of space that contain nothing but the occasional random molecule, a few lost comets and…
… But a circle of blackness shifts slightly, the eye reconsiders perspective, and what was apparently the awesome distance of Interstellar wossname becomes a world under darkness, its stars 
the lights of what will charitably be called civilisation.
Pyramids – Terry Pratchett
It’s bad enough being new on the job, but Teppic hasn’t a clue as to what a pharaoh is supposed to do. After all, he’s been trained at Ankh-Morpork’s famed assassins’ school, across the sea from the Kingdom of the Sun. First, there’s the monumental task of building a suitable resting place for Dad — a pyramid to end all pyramids. Then there are the myriad administrative duties, such as dealing with mad priests, sacred crocodiles, and marching mummies. And to top it all off, the adolescent pharaoh discovers deceit, betrayal – not to mention a headstrong handmaiden – at the heart of his realm.
My Thoughts…
I have been thinking about Terry Pratchett a lot lately and my love of the Discworld series. This is why I wanted to feature one of these books today.
These books are great fun to read. They are lighthearted and humorous, and full of fantastic quotes that I have saved throughout the course of reading them. My favourite from Pyramids is: –
“The conversation of human beings seldom interested him, but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying.”
The narrative and the characters within spoof human character and how faith and traditionalism affect human behaviour. These books are laugh out loud hilarious, and anything that features the character of death, however brief, is a hit with me.
What’s really good about pyramids is that it is a standalone novel. It’s fair to say that any of the books can be picked up independently, but the character set in Pyramids don’t seem to appear in any other future novels. So, this is an undisputed choice if you want to sample the Discworld series without committing to the wider series.
Have you read Pyramids, or any of the other books in the Discworld series? Let me know in the comments!
