small gods

I just realized that I haven’t written about Terry Pratchett yet. Actually, I also realized that I haven’t read nearly enough books of him. So … oh well, I think you already got the message :) …

Content
Small Gods is one of the many Discworld Novels he wrote. I won’t go into very much detail here, it’s mainly about religion and religious people living on a flat world (disc), which is carried by 4 elephants standing on shell of a giant turtle, which is swimming through the universe. There are many gods on the discworld, but they can only live as long as people believe in them. The more followers they have, the more powerful they are.
The god Om has a whole state praying to him. Omnianism is state religion in Omnia. There’s lots of inquisition and burning people going on. But soon the God finds out that out of those hundreds of thousands of followers, actually only one person believes in him – and he has to get his powers back, because he’s trapped in the body of a little turtoise, powerless, and things get difficult …

Style
Pratchett is such an awesome writer. He manages to talk about real people, to criticize society, to ask very difficult questions and point out very tough things by writing a hilarious, extremely inventive, ingenious story about a funny dude running around with a god trapped in the body of a small tortoise. The book is never serious. The book never feels heavy, I actually laughed a lot reading in the metro, and still, between the lines, there’s a lot of truth going on. Serious truth. It’s an incredible skill cheering people up whilst adressing such issues.
And apart from this “meta” writing skills, his writing skills are amazing and outstanding. I decided to allow myself one discworld novel a month from now on, until I run out of money or books eventually.

Rating
1

(Thanks to Thomas for the awesome book!)

Quotes

It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.

The existance of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere.

Brutha`s foot kicked against something yellow-white, which bounced away among the rocks making a noice like a sackful of coconuts. In the stifling empty silence of the desert, it echoed loudly.
“What was that?”
“Definitely not a skull”, lied Om. “Don’t worry …”
“There’s bones everywhere”
“Well? What did you expect? This is a desert! People die here! It’s a very popular occupation in this vicinity!”

Cusp had formed an opinion that Vorbis was somehhere on the other side of madness. Ordinary madness he could deal with. But Vorbis had passed right through that red barrier and had built some kind of logical structure on the other side.

The unwritten motto of the Inquisition: Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum.

“The way I see it, logic is only a way of being ignorant by numbers.”

There were 1183 religious books in the library, each one – according to itself – the only book any man need ever read. It was sort of nice to see them all together. As Didactylos used to say, you had to laugh.