GoKawiilThe spell that wouldn't leave
There is a theory, not necessarily a really good theory, but a theory nevertheless, that all memories are a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture1 than most, put it this way:
Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture.
I was sixteen when I first read that sentence. I was sitting in the back row of a French classroom, next to my friend Mathieu, and the teacher was explaining something important about a comma. The pocket edition was cheap, the cover was a weird mix of grey and lurid colours, and Mathieu and I had read every Pratchett the school library would lend us, plus several it would not.
The sentence has been in my head ever since. It refuses to leave. Occasionally it kicks over the furniture.
The library at the back of the class
There is a kind of reading you only do at fifteen, and only really in places you are not supposed to be reading. The back of a classroom counts. So does the bottom of a sleeping bag, the wrong bus, and the ten minutes between someone announcing dinner and dinner actually arriving. The book has to be small enough to disappear when a teacher looks up. Pocket editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. Pratchett’s were small, thin, and printed on a kind of flimsy paper that made it easier to disrespect, and therefore ended up slightly battered.
He wrote books that were the right size for hiding. A whole cosmology, a whole flat world balanced on a turtle, and you could slide it (poorly) inside a maths textbook with a centimetre to spare.
A brief theory of why he worked on teenagers
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