Anyway

Terry Pratch­ett’s Small Gods is a good place to start in the pan­theon of the Dis­cworld books. That’s the reas­on we chose it, rather than one of the many oth­ers, to read in book club. There are a couple of places where hav­ing read some of the oth­er books would give some addi­tion­al depth (the lib­rar­i­an, or Death), but it’s not neces­sary for the enjoy­ment of the story. There are a lot of Dis­cworld books. To get some­thing of a pic­ture of how they’re all related, try the Read­ing Order Guide (link from Boing­Bo­ing).

I remem­ber read­ing Dis­cworld books when I was study­ing phys­ics, but then some­how got out of the habit (prob­ably because they wer­en’t read­ily avail­able in Ger­many where I was liv­ing at the time). So I was glad to be reminded of just how good a read they can be. Small Gods is a par­ody of reli­gions, gods, and inquis­i­tions. It tells the story of a small god (the defin­i­tion being one that does­n’t have many fol­low­ers and there­fore does­n’t have much power) and his sym­bi­os­is with the one true believ­er. Along the way, Pratch­ett neatly pokes fun at organ­ized reli­gion, the Inquis­i­tion, philo­soph­ers, and lots of oth­er things. It’s the sort of book you read for the snide asides as much as the storyline. It can be read at lots of levels; you can just read and enjoy the story or think about the deep­er implic­a­tions for com­par­at­ive reli­gions. We had fun dis­cuss­ing the rela­tion­ship between Om and Brutha in terms of who needed whom the most. Both Om and Brutha change and learn dur­ing the book’s events; Om becom­ing less venge­ful (although while he’s in tor­toise form there’s not much he can do to carry out any venge­ful actions) and more thought­ful through being mal­treated (run­ning gag: “there’s good eat­ing on a tor­toise” with­in earshot of him) and through Brutha’s bar­gain­ing power (he is, after all, the reas­on that Om is sen­tient although it takes him a while to fig­ure that out).

All in all, worth try­ing if you haven’t already, even if you don’t usu­ally read fantasy or sci­ence fic­tion. Just don’t blame me if you get hooked on the series.

Here’s a review of Ant­o­nia Fraser’s The Wives of Henry VIII (there also seems to be an updated ver­sion, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Women in His­tory)), which the book­club picked, par­tially because I’d read it before and thought it was inter­est­ing, par­tially because most of the book­club mem­bers knew a little about that peri­od but not much and wanted to learn more, and par­tially because one book­club mem­ber will read any­thing and everything about the Tudors. Every­one enjoyed the book, but with some caveats.

To go with it, I read Alis­on Weir’s Henry VIII: The King and His Court. Read­ing both books at much the same time was good, I found they com­ple­men­ted each oth­er and helped me under­stand more of what was going on.

The Henry VIII book mostly con­cen­trates on the King him­self, what he was like as a young man (incred­ibly gif­ted, hand­some, and strong, if the records are all to be believed), how the court func­tioned, what all the people around the King were meant to do, how much things cost, what the fash­ions of the time were. It then goes into the King’s life, and how, to quote Alis­on Weir, Henry began his reign in a medi­aev­al king­dom, he ended it in a mod­ern state. I found the first part of the book to be the most inter­est­ing, per­haps because I got rather lost with all the people who kept chan­ging names as they were pro­moted and demoted, and the King him­self became less sym­path­et­ic as he became more dic­tat­ori­al and averse to being crossed.

The Wives book (and Alis­on Weir has also writ­ten one on that sub­ject, which I haven’t read) con­cen­trates on the wives them­selves, their per­son­al­it­ies and their his­tor­ies. Ant­o­nia Fraser, unlike Alis­on Weir, gen­er­ally uses the same name to describe the same per­son through the book, which makes fol­low­ing along who did what when much easi­er. I also found her fam­ily trees to be of more use. She brings up a lot of inter­est­ing points about the expect­a­tions placed on women in those times, that people genu­inely believed that Henry ruled by divine right (which makes it easi­er to under­stand some of what happened), and that Henry towards the end of his life was driv­en by the need for a male heir (iron­ic­ally) and saw his daugh­ters, just like his sis­ter, as pawns to be used to prop up his king­dom by means of alli­ances. Even though Henry saw that his own mar­riages should also be use­ful (polit­ic­ally and reli­giously), he had a great tal­ent for con­vin­cing him­self that God wanted him to do what he wanted to do any­way and thus he could always con­vince him­self that the woman who cur­rently attrac­ted him was the one he had to marry.

It’s inter­est­ing to note the dif­fer­ences in the books. Alis­on Weir is obvi­ously a fan of Cath­er­ine of Aragon, and does­n’t much like Anne Boleyn. Ant­o­nia Fraser is sym­path­et­ic to Cath­er­ine, but seems to admire Anne, des­pite her sharp tongue and lack of dis­cre­tion. They both sym­path­ize with Henry’s pre­dic­a­ment, though not with how he chose to solve it.

The main prob­lem with both books is that there is a lot of detail, and they mostly seem to be aimed at an audi­ence that already knows some­thing of the era and the people involved. So those of us who did­n’t study his­tory at school in Eng­land are at a bit of a dis­ad­vant­age. Over­all, how­ever, both books are worth read­ing, you might just need to have some ref­er­ence mater­i­al at hand (or be pre­pared to skim a bit in the long con­fus­ing passages).

Daniel Gil­ber­t’s Stum­bling on Hap­pi­ness is rightly pop­u­lar (I had to wait some time before it became avail­able at the loc­al lib­rary). Des­pite the title, it’s not one of these “sev­en steps to real hap­pi­ness” books. It’s more a book that tells you why people’s expect­a­tions of what will or should make them happy are often mis­placed. Lots of inter­est­ing bits of inform­a­tion about how the mind works, and what it does and does­n’t do, which explained a lot to me. A couple of examples: why is it that when you take a photo of some­thing, and then try to remem­ber it, all you get is a men­tal image of the photo you took? Why is it that the end­ing of a movie has a lar­ger effect on what you think about the movie than a ran­dom piece in the middle? All fas­cin­at­ing stuff and well worth read­ing if you want to under­stand why people do some of the things they do and think the way they do.

Which is not to say I don’t have quibbles with the book, I do, but those are minor. And mostly in the last chapter, where I won­der wheth­er some of the sur­veys he quotes would have had dif­fer­ent res­ults had they been car­ried out in oth­er coun­tries or oth­er cultures. 

In all, I recom­mend read­ing this book if you’re at all inter­ested in what makes people tick. Wheth­er you agree with all the points he makes or not, it cer­tainly will make you think about your own beha­viour, and give you explan­a­tions for oth­ers’ beha­viour that you may not have come up with otherwise.