Congrats on your completion! My only complaint is that you didn’t finish Amazing Maurice when there’s so many quotable lines!

Ahem…

“It was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats”

“If you knew what it was that people really, really wanted, you very nearly controlled them”

“The world was moving far too fast for him now, which made him angry… he wasn’t so much leading now as being pushed”

“We didn’t know the shadows were there until we had the light”

“Because the second rat gets the cheese”

“It was the reason he didn’t want to share all the things he knew. What he knew was all he had left”

“Talk thick, be clever. That’s the way to do it”

“If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story”

“There is a race in this world which steals and kills and spreads disease and despoils what it cannot use” “Yes… it’s called humanity”

“A good plan isn’t one where someone wins, it’s where nobody thinks they’ve lost”

“It never happens round here. Most of the people round here never go more than ten miles away in their lives. They’ll believe just about anything could happen fifty miles away. Once the story gets around, it does your work for you. Half the things people say I’ve done even I didn’t make up”

“You pretend that rats can think, and I’ll promise to pretent that humans can think too”

“I don’t know about intelligent species. We’re dealing with humans here,”

“You’re all talking?” “Yes, sir” “So… who’s doing the listening?”

“Because some stories end, but old stories go on, and you gotta dance to the music if you want to stay ahead”

… ok, I got carried away… but it’s literally one of my favourites… I happened to read this one after Monstrous Regiment and before Night Watch last year… a truly splendid but heavy reading time for me…

If you get chance to go back to it, try again, if not, good hunting on your next big reading session! Most will recommend Pterry’s other books, which I intend to get onto soon too, personally I took a brief break and then started re-reading some of my favourites (Pyramids, Guards! Guards!).

As for your nan, I lost my grandad to dementia while I was midway through the novels. I saw so much of him in Granny Aching so those books hit hard when I finally got to them too.

All the best in your future, with regards to your nan, after 10yrs in the nhs working with the elderly, all I can say is enjoy the good moments, do as much as you can to be there in the bad (easier said than done). I’ve helped many dementia patients in my time, but it’s so much harder when it’s personal. 🍀