checkers65477 | Tiny bubbles

I slogged through Small Gods by Terry Pratchett and in the end it managed to delight me and surprise me a little bit. The Discworld books are always fun and almost always make me stop and think in the end. This time it was about faith. The religions in the book are contrived; mocking the type of religion a lot of people have, where faith is only done by rote in an effort to look out for oneself. In Small Gods, gods exist only if humans believe in them. Brutha has a blind faith in the god Om and that faith brings Om back into power, but Brutha's faith is only complete and powerful once he questions it and sees through the things others have done in religion's name--things he once would have gone along with, without considering why.

Some of the ideas made me cringe a little, but hey, if faith can't stand up to some poking and you never examine it carefully, then what good is it?

I've also been reading Some of the Kinder Planets by Tim Wynne-Jones, which I borrowed from the mwt library. It's out of print, but he's written lots of other books, including the Rex Zero ones, and A Thief in the House of Memory and The Boy in the Burning House, both of which I've heard good things about. Can he possibly be related to Diana Wynne Jones, only with an extraneous hyphen? Anyway, the short stories are so good that they make even a non-writer like me think of writing. He makes it seem that effortless, taking ordinary situations and making them extraordinary.

Edit: Some of the Kinder Planets does not seem to be out of print, according to Amazon.

Have I mentioned that I am a champagne junkie? A champagne ho? I love love love the stuff. A surprise bottle of it showed up in the refrigerator. Woot!