(0:00)Hello! I recently finished Nation by Terry Pratchett which is the book I'm holding right now. I wanted to do a book review of it here on my second channel. I just dropped it. It's okay.

(0:10) So I love Terry Pratchett. I love Discworld. If you look behind me sometimes you may be able to see some Discworld novels. I think they're actually lower than below the plane of the video, but I have lots of Discworld novels. Big fan of Discworld, big fan of Terry Pratchett.

(0:22) This is not a Discworld novel. I think it may be the first non-Discworld Terry Pratchett novel I have ever read. And I am glad that it's not a Discworld novel, cuz I'm always recommending Terry Pratchett to my friends and they're always saying "But Hank, I don't understand what the hell is going on!"

(0:35) It's, it's very easy to get confused. So now I have a book I can recommend to my friends that does not take place in Discworld and thus it's not extremely confusing to get into. If you would like to read a Terry Pratchett book.

(0:45) For some reason Terry Pratchett's young adult fiction seems to, uh, be much deeper and more interesting to me than the, uh, the adult stuff. And I don't know why that is. I'm not saying his adult stuff isn't awesome, I'm just saying that, uh, it doesn't play with my mind the same way.

(1:01) It certainly does play with my mind a little bit. The satire is amazing and, and fascinating and I love to hear about, you know, his presumptions about the invention of journalism and money and postage stamps and so on.

(1:12) But it seems like he can a lot more sincere when he's dealing with a younger audience. And uh, that's very exciting and I can tell that that is some thing that he is good at and it's also something that I enjoy very much. I enjoy sincerity and I enjoy seeing that side of Terry Pratchett come out.

(1:29) And I'm not saying that his- the wit isn't there. The wit is totally still there. It's still Terry Pratchett, he still has all of his amazing you know bizarre footnotes and sort of like extremely imaginative and like amazing quips that I want to memorize and just shout out at my friends whenever an appropriate moment arises.

(1:50) I'm mostly interested in books that are entertaining but also uh, keep me thinking in like deep and meaningful ways. And this is very much that sort of book.

(2:00) I think one of the awesome things that that uh, Terry Pratchett does here is he challenges our assumptions about assumptions. So it's easy to question the assumptions of a boy who lives on an island that doesn't have medicine or capitalism or any of the things that you might value personally. And say like oh yeah of course that stuff is silly. But then Terry Pratchett flips it right around and says yeah but the stuff you believe is also silly.

(2:21) And by the way, the stuff that he believes turns out is extremely useful and in some cases so useful that you can uh, kill people with it. But it's a trick. It's a trick that the author plays on the reader and it's a wonderful trick because it's true. And it's something that you know is true. But you don't really feel it's true unless you can see a real situation where you can feel really invested where the truth becomes apparent. And that's done very well in Nation.

(2:46) Now it's clearly not the only interesting thing about this book. It's literally not the only interesting theme that Terry Pratchett plays with, but that one personally affected me a lot.

(2:54) And uh yeah, I laughed a lot and at 3 o'clock in the morning when I was finishing the book I totally had to stop myself from sobbing because I didn't want to wake up my wife. But it was like literally a happy cry, the kind of crying I do at weddings.

(3:05) It's just a beautiful story. And it has a really beautiful ending. So yeah. I don't care what kind of novels you like, I don't care if you like fantasy or Terry Pratchett or cynical witty novels. I don't think that I know any one who wouldn't enjoy this book so I suggest that you buy it.

(3:22) That is my official uh, star rating. That's 72 stars. Uh which is the maximum number of stars that a book can get. 72.

(3:33) There's a link in my pants to buy Nation. And next I'm going to be reading The Forge of God, which is a hard science-fiction novel by Greg Bear if you would like to read along. You can go to your local bookshop and buy Forge of God. Or get it on amazon.com. There's a link in my pants.