I’ll just set the scene.

It is a dark and stormy night three figures hunched around a cauldron, illuminated by a streak of lightning. “As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: “When shall we three meet again?”
There was a pause.
Finally another voice said, in a far more ordinary tones: ‘Well, I can do next Tuesday.'”

This is a cut-down version of the opening scene of Wyrd Sisters and if you’re familiar with Macbeth you would have noticed some major similarities. Wyrd Sisters is Sir Terry Pratchett’s take on Macbeth and is the second book to feature the witches. He takes Macbeth apart, pulls out all the most important elements and then puts it together in a Discworld manner. The witches are our familiar trio: Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick. We have all the important elements, an assassination of a king who then remains and haunts the castle.

We also have my favourite cat in literature – Greebo. We see much more of him in Witches Abroad, but that’s another book for another time.

This is a wonderful book. I actually reviewed it for my year 11 English Literature class which I took a few years ago. I did all the right things for my talk including reducing the talk to point form and writing them down onto cue cards, I even took the cards with me to the front of the class and looked at them. That was where the cards fell down completely as I changed the order of my speech while I was talking, so I’d come to a particular card realise I’d done it throw in an aside of ‘I’ve mentioned that already’ and throw it away. Actually, I threw the cards away as I used them, it was much more fun and I even got a couple of laughs with it.

If you’re desperate to hear and see me say a few words about this book you can watch the video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE5Kl5oyCuM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&border=1]