In Her Good Books
Matthew Perry, Terry Pratchett and Crying Real Tears From Our Eyes
Books Mentioned in This Episode
Just Another Missing Person by Gillian McAllister
The Lost Book Shop by Evie Woods
Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry
Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins
Libro.fm.
Use our code GOODBOOKS at checkout and get two books for the price of your first months membership!
Find us at:
www.goodbookspodcast.com
Facebook - In Her Good Books Podcast
Instagram - @inhergoodbookspodcast
TikTok - @inhergoodbookspodcast
We are affiliated with Libro.fm, but all reviews are our true and honest opinions!
Books Mentioned in This Episode
Just Another Missing Person by Gillian McAllister
The Lost Book Shop by Evie Woods
Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry
Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins
Libro.fm.
Use our code GOODBOOKS at checkout and get two books for the price of your first months membership!
Find us at:
www.goodbookspodcast.com
Facebook - In Her Good Books Podcast
Instagram - @inhergoodbookspodcast
TikTok - @inhergoodbookspodcast
We are affiliated with Libro.fm, but all reviews are our true and honest opinions!
Hello everyone and welcome to In Her Good Books. I'm Shanna.
Speaker 2:And I'm Jen, and this is a podcast where two friends talk about books. How are you, jen? I'm good. Shanna, how are you? I'm pretty good. Good, you did any reading? I did? Well, yes, I did. Was it good? I said that like it was really good, it was regular.
Speaker 1:It was regular reading. Nothing stand out.
Speaker 2:Nothing stand out and also regular amount. So I am pretty regular.
Speaker 1:Sweet, you heard it here first, guys, jen's regular.
Speaker 2:In the reading way, not in personality way or poo way, or the pooping way.
Speaker 1:I mean, maybe it's a poo way, but like I don't want to talk about that right now, okay. And this is a podcast where two friends talk about.
Speaker 2:Shut up. What did you read? So I read a book called Just Another Missing Person by Jillian McAllister.
Speaker 1:That makes me think about the other day when I was like oh, are you like normal, sad, or is it just depression? You know, just Just depression.
Speaker 2:Just another missing person. Just your regular depression, don't be a baby.
Speaker 2:So I read another book by her this year called Wrong Place, wrong Time. This one was about a mom who witnesses her teenage boy killing someone. Oh yes, it just looks out her window, sees her son murders someone. Then when she wakes up in the morning, she's gone back in time. It's the day before this happens. And then every time she wakes up she just goes back in time to different important dates pertaining to what's happened. And it was really really good. I really really liked that.
Speaker 2:So when I saw this book on Book of the Month, I was like sweet, yes, I want more of that. So I got it immediately and it is about a detective named Julia who is investigating the disappearance of a woman named Olivia, but then a masked stranger forces her to plant evidence at the crime scene that would point the finger at this other guy, and if she doesn't do it, then he's going to reveal a very big secret that she has that involves her teenage daughter, and she doesn't want that at all. So she's doing anything she can to protect her daughter. So she does it. But you can't just plant evidence at a crime scene and then be like and then that's done, yeah, you just walk away, yeah, especially when you're the one investigating the crime. So it just snowballs and the stakes get higher and things get worse and worse and worse.
Speaker 2:And because I had read this other book by her with this time travel bit, I just expected that this book would not necessarily be, not necessarily have time travel, but have something like a magical element. Yeah, something like that would be happening. So the whole time I was just waiting for that and there kept being little things that were a little bit weird or unexplainable in the book. So I was like, oh, this is it. It wasn't it. Were they just plot holes? No, they were just. They were explained, but just in like a normal police procedural kind of way.
Speaker 1:Well, that's actually probably good, based on the magical realism I experienced recently.
Speaker 2:I mean this is true and we will get to that, but the time travel in the other book at first that I read was really really good and interesting, so I really wanted that in this book. And then it wasn't there and it didn't mean that this book just another missing person was bad.
Speaker 1:You just went in with unrealistic expectations that were not promised to you.
Speaker 2:Yes, and it's not the author's fault. Just because she writes one time travel book, does it mean all of her books have to be time travel? She's the time travel author now and you know, maybe she even has other books that are also not time travel. But I just that's what I wanted and that's not what I got. But I mean it was still good. We had three points of view of Julia, who's the detective? And then we have, I think, a woman I think her name is Emma. She's the mother of the guy who is being framed and then this guy named Louis who is the father of the missing woman. And I always really like books that have multiple POVs. So that was really good and the twists were interesting and I didn't expect them. You never do.
Speaker 1:I never do though.
Speaker 2:So I mean, I never really trust myself, so in the end it was really good. It just wasn't really what I wanted and her writing style is a little bit. It takes a little bit to get into and I've seen this book in particular come up a few times on social media where people are like what is she trying to say in this sentence? And a lot of times it's like she has a lot of commas, so the sentences are just really long, which I like personally. So that's okay, but some people not as much. And also she's English, so sometimes the phrases she uses aren't ones that we are used to hearing. So yeah, there was just a few times where I just didn't really know what she was saying and I remember that was also the case in the previous book as well. It kind of took a little while to get into and I wasn't always sure what she was saying. I would have to read sentences over and over again, but then it only took a chapter or two before you kind of get in the groove.
Speaker 1:Nice. It sounds good, especially if you're going to it not expecting magic. Yeah, no magic in this book.
Speaker 2:Way better. Yeah, yeah. So which one do you like better? Magic book, yeah, you got me liking the weird time stuff. Yes, I've done it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm slowly converting everyone. I know yes.
Speaker 2:You want to know what I read. What did you read?
Speaker 1:I read the Lost Bookshop, so did.
Speaker 2:I who's the author? It is Evie.
Speaker 1:Woods. So here's my main problem. My notes on this book say ride Jen's good notes, so actually probably I shouldn't have started. I'll give you the bad version and then maybe you can give us a good version. Okay, let's see. The Lost Bookshop is a book advertised to me, as three different people find this magical bookshop and the books that they need are presented to them in a magical way that then teaches them something about their lives, I thought I was getting the Midnight Library. I got something entirely different that I can't compare to anything else, because I don't generally read books like this. This was about a woman who, it's set in Ireland. I thought that was nice. I always like books set in Ireland. I don't really know why. Yeah, me too. I just really like it, it's cozy it is.
Speaker 1:So I have this woman. She's getting beaten by her husband and she says no more and she leaves. Good job. She gets a job with a woman a definitely real, absolutely definitely bare woman who owns a house and then employs her and pays her money. Gets her to do her dishes and her laundry and yeah, so she's definitely not hallucinating vividly for a year. Sorry guys, I'm already showing you how much I dislike this book. Let's see how much better you can do.
Speaker 2:Well, at this house that she works at, she meets a man named Henry, and he's Hugh Grant, he's Colin Firth, but anytime there's a bumbling Englishman, we cast either Hugh Grant or Colin Firth respectively. It's yeah, and that makes it good because we love them.
Speaker 1:He alone gave this book a star.
Speaker 2:Yes, so he's at the house looking for a bookshop that is supposed to be there but doesn't exist. But maybe existed sometime because he had been in it and also the book opens in a bookshop, and that is definitely there. But he's there and it's not there, and he's confused and Martha, who is this woman, is like she's all suspicious. But then, of course, they fall in love, do they? Almost immediately.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean debatable.
Speaker 2:They say that, they do say it, they say it, you're right. Henry says Martha, martha, martha, I love you, I love you, I love you, but we can't be together.
Speaker 1:But why there's no? Reason why, Unless of course, it's the trauma from her husband beating her all the time. But that's not it. No, it's not. That would be reasonable.
Speaker 2:That would be reasonable.
Speaker 1:Guys, Kate, here's the thing this book has really good reviews. It's got like 18,000 reviews on Goodreads and four and a half stars. So I went into this thinking this is going to be at least generically good.
Speaker 2:There's a whole other storyline of this woman named Opaline, who, which, when I read the synopsis, that name was like yeah.
Speaker 1:I hated it. Oh, it gets one eighth of a star from me.
Speaker 2:That was really the name annoyed me so much. But she's back in like ye olden days time and she leaves her family, who is her mom and her brother, and an arranged marriage and goes to France to have her own life. Cool. Then she magically, very conveniently, just kind of gets given a store. That is nice, here, here's a store, you can have it, yeah. And she opens a bookshop and then she becomes like a literary sleuth. She's trying to find Emily Bronte's lost second novel, the manuscript.
Speaker 1:There was a twist later, but it wasn't a twist, because the first time that they said I was corresponding with my friend Jane. Were you surprised that it was Jane?
Speaker 2:Austen, I didn't even see the notice that, oh, I was getting annoyed at how much they weren't saying it.
Speaker 1:But yes, it continued At least. Maybe I'm wrong, I'm pretty sure it was.
Speaker 2:Possibly that would make sense. Yeah, yeah. So that is what the book is about Go back and forth between Henry's point of view and Martha's point of view and Opaline's point of view, and eventually Opaline gets put in an asylum by her brother.
Speaker 1:That's when I really started tuning out.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I like the asylum part the best, really, yeah, good. I like a good old story about a woman being put in an asylum.
Speaker 1:I do generally like that, but I was getting to the point of you're doing too many stories.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, this book was probably at least three to four books mashed into one book, but without any explanation as to why that was happening.
Speaker 1:Oh, also they killed a baby, Just kidding. Sorry guys, I just spoiled this whole book If you wanted to read it. Sorry about that.
Speaker 2:We can just add this in this is going to be spoilers for the last bookshop.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Sorry if.
Speaker 2:I don't like a book enough.
Speaker 1:You're not. It's just how it's going to be.
Speaker 2:There's a ton of plot holes. There is a point where I opened up my app and it said I had one hour left and I was like that can't possibly be right, because I've been listening to this book and I don't think I've missed anything, but I don't think I've listened to 15 hours or however long it was.
Speaker 2:So I thought, oh, maybe some of these things that didn't quite make sense was because I skipped ahead for some reason. So I asked Shana hey, these things that happened, did this make sense? And Shana said absolutely not, they did not make sense. There was no explanation, that's just what happened.
Speaker 1:I had the exact same experience, standing in my kitchen listening to this book and then all of a sudden they're on a beach in the winter, in love, and I was like something I must have bumped into a counter or something. And then I did like 30 seconds, 30 seconds right. And I was like no, no, we were here. And then we're here and I don't know why.
Speaker 2:And then we're not there anymore and we're somewhere else.
Speaker 1:Nobody said go to the beach.
Speaker 2:She's there as far as I remember, yeah, no, it just didn't make sense. And then there was this whole magical bookshop about why and where and what did it have to do with anything? And then there's a whole thing about a tattoo. It's just there was also a tree, there was a tree. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:No, the tattoo. The tattoo was my least favorite part. When the tattoo part started, that was, I think, my first full-sized eye roll yeah.
Speaker 2:But that all being said, I enjoyed listening to it most of the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, me too actually weirdly enough.
Speaker 2:So a few years ago or I think it was last year, we read the Lighthouse Witches by CJ Cook and we all really, really liked it. We read it for Book Club and we get together and we're like that was a great book, but what about this? And then someone else would be like, but what about that? What about this? But what about that? And we're like, wow, a lot of things in this book didn't make sense and there's a lot of plot holes, but we still liked it.
Speaker 1:It's like this book was written for me to complain about in a way that I enjoy complaining. Yeah, it is funny.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we also read this one for Book Club. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what everyone else thought, because, yeah, I still had a nice time. That was fine. I didn't want to stop reading it. I was just a little bit confused and a little bit eye-rolly, and now it's going to be fun complaining about it for a couple hours.
Speaker 1:It's going to be so good we are going to get to complain with food and friends. That's the dream. That is the dream.
Speaker 2:So maybe if you guys want to let us know what you thought, if you've read this book, which apparently many, many people have and many, many people love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I didn't read any of the reviews. Maybe this is what the reviews say. Four stars hated it, maybe. Yeah, your turn Wait.
Speaker 2:This was a trick. Yes, so I read Friends Lovers and the Big, terrible Thing by Matthew Perry. Because you're sad, because I'm sad, I'm very, very sad, as is probably about 90% of the world.
Speaker 1:Is it regular sad, or is it just depression?
Speaker 2:I think it's depression now.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying that him dying was the trigger.
Speaker 2:But it definitely is not helping. Yeah, yeah. So I've wanted to read this for a while, since it came out, but I was really worried that whatever he said would make me not like him anymore, because I love him. Chandler is my friend. Yeah, chandler is my best friend, and also all the characters and all the movies that he plays. I love Matthew Perry. So, yeah, I was hesitant to read it and then he died, and then I got almost immediately. It came in at the library, of course, and I was like, well, I'm going to have to do that, yeah, and if you try and put a hold on it now, good luck yeah exactly, so I started reading it.
Speaker 2:The first thing he says is something like hello, my name is Matthew and I should be dead Dang. I was like ugh, I've got bad news, man, yeah. And then he says think of this as a message from the beyond. And I was just like ugh, this feels bad Too soon.
Speaker 1:Yes, ugh, it is very Chandler though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was like it works, it's just awkward. And then side funny story. When he said this, I was like, oh, I have to remember this and I need to make a note of it so that I can say it for the podcast. So I get some scrap paper off the counter, write it on the back. Hi, my name is Matthew. I should be dead. Think of this as a message from the beyond. And then sounds like oh, hey, can you take Jora's prescription to the pharmacy. And then I forgot and it was still in the car and he picks it up and he's like oh my gosh, what did you write on this? It's on the back. I was like, well, I thought that this was just paper. And he's like the pharmacy that we use is one that he works with for his job. So he knows everybody there, he knows the pharmacist, and he's like I work with these people. What are they? I'm like you're going to have to explain that. It's just Matthew Perry. Yeah, he's like these medications are antidepressants.
Speaker 1:They're going to be concerned, yeah, so anyway, you think it'd be easier if you know them, because you'd be like yo. You know how my wife's she's a little we've met her.
Speaker 2:This is why it's so. The book, it did make me like him just a little bit less, not really like him a little bit less, but it did make me like, oh man, why you got to do that Kind of.
Speaker 1:I read the Jackie Chan biography, autobiography, and I mean he's got some sucky stuff about him. But I like honesty more than I like liking somebody, so I didn't like him any less. I just know more crappy stuff about him now.
Speaker 2:Overall, it was really good. It was really interesting. I don't really know that much about celebrities' lives. It's never been something that's interesting to me, so I don't read magazines like celebrity magazines. I don't follow them really on social media. I don't know very much. I always think I know some stuff, but then I read books like this and I'm like I knew none of this. This is all news to me. Even you knew stuff that I don't know, so it was really interesting. It's fun that he's from Canada. His mom's from Canada. He grew up here and beat up our Prime Minister.
Speaker 1:That's cool, yeah, that's cool, they went to the same school which actually, when I heard that I only know stuff about him now because he died, if you had done this before I would have nothing to say. But when I found out that he went to the same school as Justin Trudeau, I was like, oh okay, shut up, rich Kid. I thought you were gonna go like rags to riches here but, no, it sounds like you started in the right room.
Speaker 2:Yeah, his mom worked for Pierre Trudeau. I thought she was a single mom, but yeah, I thought it was really interesting. I mean, his addictions were like a lot Money and fame, wow. And just the time A lot of his alcohol addiction started before he was famous. He started taking, he said, when he was three months old. He was colicky and the doctor prescribed a barbiturate to him as a baby. That's too bad, yeah, and that was apparently a pretty common practice. So if he's born maybe already with like a you know propensity to be addicted and then immediately is given very hard drugs, yeah, it's not a good start.
Speaker 1:It's not a good start. Definitely not the way you want your brain to be automatically wiring.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so he said. There's like videos of him as an infant being very visibly stoned out of his mind.
Speaker 1:He's older than us, how does he have videos?
Speaker 2:There's videos. There's videos. It was barely.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, they're probably like back and white, like crank or something, but there's videos. He was born in 1969, which is same as my mom. Same as my mom? Yeah Well, I think pretty much everyone. All of our moms and dads are all 1969.
Speaker 1:Well, not my dad, but yeah, also not my dad, my mom, your mom, my dad's birthday is cool because it's six seven, six seven.
Speaker 2:That's cool. That's cool, yeah, my dad's 67. This is weird, yeah, eventually, like because we just go through every time he goes to rehab and every time he relapses and all the drugs he does, and like by the end of it I was like, oh my God, this is getting a bit tiring, which I'm sure was also tiring for him, probably everyone he knows. Yeah, so, and it was, he gets a little bit like the Lord.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because because he goes T total right, he goes full nothing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and he goes when he goes through AA. And then he stopped drugs only because well, mostly because they just he had such a high tolerance that they didn't they didn't do anything to him anymore except for put him in the hospital.
Speaker 1:Probably cost him a lot of money. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah, overall it was really good.
Speaker 1:I really liked it and I'm really sad he died, yeah, especially when he was just starting to do a lot of really good work for addiction. Yeah, I'm hoping that. What is it like? His dad's maybe gonna get the money, but I don't know. The last I heard was like that there is because he didn't have, he wasn't married and he didn't have any kids, so they wanted to where his estate's gonna go, because obviously he's got much money. Yes, so I'm hoping that he has a will that would put it towards. You know his addiction programs.
Speaker 2:But I don't know he was talking like the end of the book. He was talking about maybe one day I'll meet someone and maybe one day I'll have kids and he really loved kids and really wanted that. Then he just like immediately dies.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a bummer.
Speaker 2:There's a bummer, yeah, but recommend the book if you're a fan.
Speaker 1:My next book did you cry? No, my book made me cry, and the book I'm reading right now has been making me cry. Yeah, turns out Terry Pratchett just makes me cry. I just love him so much that I can't stop crying. The things that he's talking about aren't even that sad. I just love him so dearly and he makes my heart well, so big, like the Grinch, that it pushes all the tears up and it will fall out of my eyes. I read Going Postal by Terry Pratchett. It's a Discworld novel, I know. Just come back, come back, guys. So Discworld, I'm not going to tell you about it, but I've read 21. Out of 41 books, that's really good. She means I'm over halfway and yeah, this one, I think, is my favorite one out of everything so far. That's amazing. It was so good. It is book number 33 in the series and it is the first moist von Lipwig novel. The main character's name is moist von Lipwig.
Speaker 2:You heard me correctly.
Speaker 1:So you just you get used to the word moist a lot.
Speaker 2:Sherry would not be able to read this book Absolutely not. Maybe she'd have a change of heart by the end of it. Maybe it's therapy for her.
Speaker 1:Yes, immersion therapy, yes. So yeah, it's the first moist von Lipwig story out of three total books that he's the main character of. The other ones are making money and raising steam, and so there are a bunch of different ways to read Discworld. You can read them in the sub series, and I did that with the City Watch because it's nice to just read a book and then keep going through those character stories without, I don't know, taking a break. You just get to stay with them. But because this first one was book number 33, that means I'm getting close to the end, and so it made me sad thinking about picking up the next ones, because then I'm just too close to the end. So I said no, no, not yet. I'm going to save those for Future Shanna to munch on. But anyways, this book, what's it about? Let me tell you. Oh, I'll tell you a couple more interesting things about it. Interesting, come back, guys, come back.
Speaker 1:Terry Pratchett is known for not doing chapters. He only does them in his children's novels, which is I just was reading today, because I'm also reading his biography called Life in Footnotes, about when he started writing. His editor said for his children's books you have to put chapters in for the parents and you have to put it in for the kids. So he begrudgingly accepted that that is a fact with the children's novels. But this is one of the only Discworld novels that has chapters, and he did them. So each chapter at the beginning has a little summary about what's going to happen. Moist saves a cat, a fire happens, and so you kind of know what's going to happen in the chapter, which was weird and different and almost like off-putting, because I'm not used to it in a Discworld novel, but it was fine. Okay, now I'll tell you what it's about. It's set in Ancmoor Pork, which is the main city of the novels.
Speaker 1:Moist Fun Lipwig is a con artist and he is being hanged for his crimes. And so we open up, gets hanged the end, but close this. I cry. No, just kidding the patrician Havilok Fetnari. He faked the hanging because he wants to offer Moist a job as the postmaster for the rundown, completely defunct post office, and so he's given a choice. He's like you can either take this job or you can walk out that door Easy, right. So Moist is like yeah, absolutely Open to the door, obvious choice, and it's just a pit. So I mean you can, but he doesn't. He takes job as postmaster and the post office is.
Speaker 1:It has been out of service for decades and there's two staff there and the way that a lot of stuff in the disc world works, but in the post office it's like the postmasters have children who grow up to work the post office and it's like a family heritage, like they have postmaster blood, and so the people who are there are very serious about the post office and the whole place is just stuffed to the point where you open doors and then letters fall out and there's a lot of undelivered mail. So he's got a big job. There's also the clacks which are like it's not the telephone, it's like signaling Morse code. There are lights that go so you can do long distance messaging, but it is failing because of just horrible management and corporate greed. So it's got this whole underpinning of the story that is. It's just so, jen, it's so good it's so good.
Speaker 1:There's a love story in it Adora Bell, Deerheart which have you ever heard a cuter name? Not at all Adora and moist. So they made my heart flutter, which you know is totally normal. It's so romantic. No, it's the lack of romance that really gets my heart singing. But yeah, it is funny and smart and it's about people and words. The letters, and like the words and everything, talk because the letters want to be delivered. It's fantastic. It's about human rights and corporate greed and redemption and choices, and it's just so freaking well done. It is so funny and it is so smart and I just can't handle.
Speaker 2:It Sounds great. I mean, it sounds weird, it's like not something I would like. But I also have read one Discworld book Hogfather and it was really very, very good. So I 100% believe you and I'm very interested.
Speaker 1:Well, don't worry, I have more to say, thank God. So, like I was saying, there's a bunch of different ways to read Discworld and Discworld Emporium. You can go online They've got a whole list, that's like, because 41 books is obviously intimidating and there's a huge fandom around the whole thing and you know people can suck the Discworld Emporium. These people don't suck. So, okay, the three ways you can do Chronological, where you read the stories as they were released, and that's great, great way to do it. You get to watch the world develop as it was written. Then there's Sub-Series. So, like I was saying, I did the entire City Watch series.
Speaker 1:There's the Witches, the Watch, unseen University Death, the Industrial Revolution, which is a going postal, isn't that one? The God's Books, and then Young Readers Books. And then they had a whole other section called Introductory Books, and Going Postal is one of them, because they're like gateway books where you don't have to know a ton of other Discworld stuff to follow the story and enjoy it. If you do, that's good and you're gonna get more of it, but it's just a really good place to start and see the style. And Mort is another one. That's a Death Book. That's the first Death Book. Weird Sisters is a Witches book and Small Gods is so good, it's so freaking good. They're all good. Because I love Terry Pratchett so dearly, with my whole heart, I just keep loving him more. I keep thinking, maybe I'll love him less.
Speaker 2:No, no, you should just tell a couple little stories.
Speaker 1:I'm reading the biography. It is written by his assistant and you can just tell that this book was written by somebody who genuinely loved this man. And Rob Wilkins is the author. And Terry Pratchett died fairly young, I mean, he was, I think, 5060.
Speaker 2:Somewhere in there. Yeah, old enough to have gray hair, but not like old not not old enough to die from.
Speaker 1:It was a deteriorated brain dementia thing. It was like a really rare one, and so later in his life he started writing notes for his biography and so it's a collection of stuff from his assistant who worked with him for years and years and years, carries own notes and then, just like the people who are close to him and it's so funny, I all day long I have been sending Jen Just stuff from it.
Speaker 2:She's like oh sorry, you're probably totally bored. No one hear any of this, but too bad. I'm like no, actually I love it. It's so funny and so interesting, it's it's so good.
Speaker 1:Let me see. Oh it just everything makes me so happy. Do you want to hear the one that made me cry? I haven't told it to you. Yeah, I was like, genuinely, like Multiple tears were coming out of my eyes.
Speaker 1:Um, so the day that his daughter's born, he Goes to the hospital, of course, and then they tell the whole story about her birth and how, when he goes home, he is just his favorite memory in his entire life is that drive home on that winter night and Going up to his house and he falls on his face and the food that he ate when he went inside is like, for the rest of his life, the best meal he's ever had. Just because of all he can think is like I'm a father and he's just Completely elated. But then they talk about how, when he got the disease and he knew that he was going to start losing his memories, how that was the one that he couldn't stand the thought of losing, like that was what broke his heart and he was always like reminding himself of it. So he didn't lose it.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness, there's actual tears.
Speaker 1:It's so beautiful. His daughter Rihanna project. She won an award. She does video game writing and she won for the script I believe are the writing of Tomb Raider 2, which is very cool. Yep, I really like they're talking about. This is a memory of Rihanna's that her dad would take her foraging and he said something like he'd be go or he would be describing in great detail which things were edible and which were only edible once.
Speaker 2:So funny.
Speaker 1:It's so funny. He decided to be a dungeon master. He played the Dungeons and Dragons with some of his friends. They all hated it. They only did it once, but In that he created the luggage, which is one of my favorite characters of any thing ever, and Also Wernberg, which is from the very first discworld novel.
Speaker 1:It's just, it's really cool Listening to all the things that happened in his life and being able to pick out which things made their way into the discworld. Oh, the way that he announced his mother's death to his assistant. Oh, funny, oh, so the way that he would, anytime anybody died. Like when he heard about Douglas Adams death, he's like, oh well, at least it wasn't me, and that's what he would say anytime anybody died. But when his mother died, he went into his office and his assistant is sitting there and he says all those who still have a mother remain seated. Yeah, I love him so, so much. Here's a quote Terry told Colin Smythe that he thought the next novel, too, might be set on discworld, as he didn't think he'd exhausted all of its Possibilities in one book, thereby inadvertently producing one of the greatest understatements in publishing history.
Speaker 1:Yes, he's, he's just. He's got all this integrity as an author and as just a person. He was a working-class guy and that mentality never left him. I was telling Jen about how he didn't want to make more money than the book would make. He wanted all of his books to be able to pay themselves off. So they would offer him these obscene sums of money for his novels and then he would make his agents renegotiate for less money. One time a check for like 250,000 pounds just was in his sweater pocket and it went through the wall. They tried to offer him 750k for a nonfiction writing and he was so mad about it he didn't sell it for eight years. I Just I love him. I love everything about him. He has all the weirdest hobbies. He they had turtles and greenhouses and goats and bees, and he's so interesting, he's so so incredibly interesting.
Speaker 2:It sounds like, even if you have no idea who Terry Prashett is, if you pick up this book, you would also love him by the end, or immediately probably he's telling one story.
Speaker 1:So I I own a lot of clothes Because I never get rid of anything. These pants I'm wearing are probably 14 years old, so they're talking about how he's the same way. He just has his clothes and he wears them forever. Him and his assistant walk into a bookstore for a signing and they've got this big picture that was taken like a decade before.
Speaker 1:They talk about the hat and about how he got it, and it's just, the hat is a thing. Anybody who knows Terry Prashett knows the hat. He did gold casting of bees. It's amazing, it's all the best you know. I love a weird hobby, yeah, and he's got a lot of them. Wow, I've got four hours left in it. This is why I've not made it go faster at all. I'm like, no, I'm listening to all 15 hours of this. This is Perfection, 10 out of 10. No, I'm done. Pretty sure it can't possibly go wrong. No, several call it gets sad because he is gonna die of dementia.
Speaker 1:Oh, but he was an advocate for Assisted suicide. I want to call it, but there was, there's a different name for it. But like the right to to choose. And, yeah, he did a lot of really cool stuff. He People wanted to buy the discworld rights to make like toys, but he didn't sell them to any big company. That would make him millions and millions of dollars. No, no, he sold them to a wife and husband sculpting duo who lived in a little house and Just, they're the only people who are Legally allowed to sell discworld stuff and it's the discworld emporium is the only people who are licensed to sell these things. He worked with the same artists. He worked with the same people. He's very, very cool.
Speaker 1:I just think it's so funny that he would choose one very specific Artist and she's like you are it? Yeah, oh, and he sorry I could go on forever, but he was a huge sci-fi nerd before sci-fi was even really considered like a legit genre and so he went to sci-fi conventions and when he's younger, you get to like hear about him meeting who ends up being like his best friend through his life at these conventions and just what they were like back at the beginning of sci-fi and he talks about, like Larry Niven and, yeah, douglas Adams. It's funny because they only ever met one time. And you would think because, like, they're always put in the same sentences, like if you're talking about Terry Pratchett, somebody will bring up Douglas Adams. But yeah, they met one time at like an award thing and it was like hi, hi, what? Hi? Okay, yeah, it's, thank you for coming to my Discworlds show.
Speaker 2:Yes, it was very entertaining, thank you. Have we got any other stuff?
Speaker 1:No, it's almost Christmas. No, it's not.
Speaker 2:But it is, it kind of is, but it actually is.
Speaker 1:When my kids get back next week, we're gonna be doing the tree.
Speaker 2:Usually the tradition is in my life that we decorate the Christmas tree on my birthday, which is December 12th, which has been really good up until now. I mean, like I have a little kid before and that was, it was fine, maybe because she went back and forth to her dad so she had a Christmas tree somewhere, yeah. But right now I have two little kids 100% of the time and I feel like I am depriving them of Christmas by making them wait that long. So last year you put up the tree, we just didn't decorate it until my birthday.
Speaker 1:Let's put a special ornament on your birthday. That way it's still kind of special. We'll do the dried oranges. Oh, I want to make those so bad. I have my air fryer says dehydrate. It has a function. We can do it in 17 batches.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna try in the oven first, but I do want to do like a real dehydrator.
Speaker 1:My dad, I think he has one.
Speaker 2:If he has one and he does not use it or want it, I will inquire because I I've been following this woman on Facebook called Canadian Pioneer Woman, yes, and she dehydrates everything and it looks cool and fun. So, like she buys, she sees like a bunch of bags of salad that are gonna be thrown out at the grocery store and they're all 50% off. She buys them, she dehydrates the salads and then she grinds it into vegetable powder and then puts it in stuff Like soup, yeah, or whatever.
Speaker 1:Like lettuce.
Speaker 2:Yeah, lettuce. And like you know, like the salad mixes that have different stuff in them, yeah, yeah, she just grinds it up into powder. That she just says this is my veggie powder. Or well, look at all that broccoli that's about to go bad. That's so smart Dehydrates, it grinds it up. Now she has broccoli powder.
Speaker 1:All you love is soup.
Speaker 2:And I love stuff that's cheap and then stuff that I can use again. So good, I love recycling. This is recycling food. Yeah, I love it, so I want to do that. But also I want to make dried citrus garlands for Christmas slash, probably just year-round, yeah, realistically. Yeah. So, but yeah, if I have a dehydrator, I'll start dehydrating stuff all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wonder I'll ask. I've been bringing all this stuff over here, like, so I had to bring all my plants in because I've got this room outside. I call it the Radio Shack. Don't worry about it, it's got. Well, it's called great big Radio Shack doors like from an actual store. Yeah, the big metal glass doors.
Speaker 2:Instead of residential doors, there's commercial doors.
Speaker 1:Yes, and it has a sticker on it that says this premise protected by a Radio Shack security system. So it makes me laugh. Anyways, it gets really cold in there now that it's cold outside, so I had to bring all of my plants inside and I have windows. They're just like not a big window room anymore. So I was like, oh, I'm gonna have to buy grow lights so that these things don't die. And then my dad person who just has everything, was like hey, can I bring some stuff to store in your basement? He's like you, betcha, opened it Like nine girl lights.
Speaker 2:It's like sweet.
Speaker 1:Sweet. This is thanks, fantastic Thanks for the girl lights and a lot of other equipment here. I don't think I'm gonna use it, but should I want to? Yeah, I got it. Yeah, yeah, many others.
Speaker 2:No, I didn't think I did. I mean last time I didn't think I did and then I realized that Matthew Perry had died. Didn't even say anything, like he died like three days before we recorded the last episode, and I just was like no, nothing's happened. But really on the inside I was like crying so yeah now the depression is the outside.
Speaker 1:Cry too, Guys. I think depression's funny.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you're not gonna laugh about it, then you're gonna cry about it. I've had it long enough that I've like graduated. It's more weird when I make jokes about it, because I mean, the last time I thought I had it I said, hey doctor, I think I'm depressed. And they said, I don't think you are. Some people just aren't all sunshine and rainbows and I think that's you Dang dang Think. Maybe now they might agree.
Speaker 1:Cool, that's good. I know it sounds not good, but it's good for getting help. Yes, I actually. I guess I graduated from depression. You did. I did Yay me. My doctor said how are those meds? And I said so bad, just stop. I said, cool, now I'm fine. I'm not gonna say that losing my husband fixed my depression, but they did both happen around the same time. It's pretty amazing. Okay, it took a year, but whatever, one year I got lots. I hope if I die tomorrow, this is gonna be really awkward.
Speaker 2:This is gonna be pretty awkward. Hi, my name is Jen. I should be dead.
Speaker 1:Please still release the episode.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's all we have for you this week.
Speaker 1:I think so too. If you want to follow us, do it then yeah look us up, we are in her good books on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 2:We are in her good books podcast on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 1:So close.
Speaker 2:So close.
Speaker 1:But yeah, otherwise see you two weeks. We'll see you in two weeks.
Speaker 2:Bye, bye. We did it, we did.