this is making me want to read some works - what would be something good to start with?
Small Gods. It’s a stand-alone, so you won’t be committing to any long-term plans, and it’s really good.
Don’t start at the beginning. The Light Fantastick and The Colour of Magic (the first two books) are Discworld finding its legs, and while they’re okay, they’re not a good intro, really. After that, there are a couple of stand-alones and several…let’s call them groupings…of multiple books that each feature a particular cast of characters: the Witches, the Watch, Dea…excuse me, DEATH (and family), the Wizards, the Moist von Lipwig books, etc. There are overlaps of supporting characters (the Patrician shows up in the Watch, Wizards and Moist books). And another early one, Equal Rites, combines the proto-Witches cycle (one mainstay character from the Witches books is a major character in ER, although in a somewhat larval way) and the Wizards.
I’d suggest, after Small Gods, going on to Mort (which is really the first book in the DEATH group). Then perhaps Wyrd Sisters. There’s no reason to read an entire grouping together, as long as you’re careful to maintain the timeline (not that there are necessarily any important spoilers, but you’ll be kind of lost as to what happened to this person and how did that person get THAT?). There was a thread a while ago that asked exactly this, but I don’t remember if it was here or the Giraffe Boards.
Just another thing to know about Discworld: until about the fourth book (Sourceror), they’re somewhat generic parodies of fantasy fiction. With Sourceror and beyond, they become wickedly funny satires of human nature and societies. Sourceror is prototypical of this, but it’s where the whole creative arc for Discworld begins, IMO.
Sourcery is the **fifth **book in the series, after The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites and Mort. I really enjoyed the first two in the series on their own merits - the first one really was just a humorous parody, but it was a good one - but there’s no denying he really got traction later on. I certainly don’t feel the poorer for having read them in publishing order as, although there might be favourites you look out for, such as the witches series or the Night Watch series, it does no harm to let them come up when they’re ready. But you could look out for:
Wyrd Sisters - Witches Abroad - Lords and Ladies
and
Guards! Guards! - Men at Arms - Feet of Clay
as a couple of mini-series that hang together pretty well.
I heartily endorse the suggestion of Mort, but I never cared for Small Gods.
There’s a good reading order guide at L-space. Dotted lines are minor connections and straight lines are major connections. You won’t miss much if you read Small Gods before Pyramids for example, but you should read Mort before Reaper Man. The later novels tend to assume some familiarity with the characters and settings.
I’d recommend starting with either Mort or Guards! Guards! I find the Rincewind novels to be the weakest, and the Watch, Death and Young Adult novels to be the strongest overall.
:smack:
I knew I should have checked the order before I posted. I was a little worried I was transposing ER and Sourcery, when I was transposing MORT and Sourcery.
Somebody once asked one of my English professors what he had thought of Harry Potter. By way of explanation, he said that whenever he read a book, he would dog-ear any page that had a bit of writing that he thought was especially witty or interesting or just particularly well written. When he read Harry Potter, he folded down exactly three pages. Then he showed us a Pratchett book that he had on hand, and it was basically every single page.
One thing that stands out in my mind is Soul Music. The book is full of jokes about Rock and Roll. In it, Death takes up begging as a new profession. Every couple of chapters there’s a little vignette where he tries his hand at begging and then gets turned down. Finally, somebody gives him a coin.
“Thank you,” said the grateful Death.
It blew my mind how patiently Pratchett had been in setting that joke up. Took something like half the book, and I never even saw it coming.
I couldn’t avoid reading the first four books in published order, as they were being published at the time I was reading them. I stopped at Mort, because it seemed Pratchett had run the concept into the ground. His fantasy parodies has become so stretched it hardly sounded like he was parodying standard fantasy stories at all.
I was right, and it took me several years to pick it all up again. He had run out of the inspiration for his initial stories. How was I to know that he was just about to take off in an entirely new (and much better) direction?
I just realized I tried to read “Good Omens” last year while on a trip - I found bits of it funny, but overall it was a slog and just ended up being kind of tedious. I got within 50 or so pages of the end and never finished it - (of course, that may be at this point because I simply forgot).
Is this indicative overall or a problem due to collaborating with Gaiman? (who’s other book I tried to read seemed fairly tedious as well).
I consider this a problem due to collaborating with Gaiman, who, based on my readings of his other books, is a gifted idea-man, but not much of a writer, and his books tend to get very bogged down. I, in my prejudice, attribute all the funny parts of Good Omens to Pratchett and all the tedious bits to Gaiman. I have no proof of this, however.
Also, I’m going to be the dissenting voice here - I didn’t really like Small Gods at all and it put me off Discworld for years. I am a firm believer in what I call “Middle Pratchett” - if you arrange all the Discworld books along a continuum, they start out as pure parody of fantasy and get progressively more “real” as they proceed, until you reach a point where the “parody” is only the thinnest veneer over stories of real people. The early books lack the sense of the “real” that the later ones have, but the later ones, to me, for all their witty turns of phrase are too -real- to be really FUNNY, and the humor is an important part of Discworld for me.
I got my re-start on Discworld with Men At Arms, and it remains one of my absolute favorites, along with Feet of Clay. In all honesty, you can skip Guards! Guards! as well. If you wanted to settle down for three books, I’d say Men At Arms, Feet of Clay, Night Watch.
That or just say to hell with it and read all the Tiffany Aching books instead. (The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Wear Midnight.). They’re probably some of Mr. Pratchett’s finest work in spite of, or perhaps because of, being “children’s novels”.
I’m rereading Snuff and I had to add this, which happens in Vimes’ mind after some tries to explain a certain sport to him, with the history and all the arcane rules (trust me, I’ve been there!).
Vimes died. The sun dropped out of the sky, giant lizards took over the world, and the stars exploded and went out and all hope vanished and gurgled into the sinktrap of oblivion. And gas filled the firmament and combusted and behold! There was a new heaven - or possibly not. And Disc and Io and and possibly verily life crawled out of the sea - or possibly didn’t because it had been made by the gods, and lizards turned to less scaly lizards - or possibly did not. And lizards turned into birds and bugs turned into butterflies and a species of apple turned into banana and a kind of monkey fell out of a tree and realised life was better when you didn’t have to spend your time hanging onto something. And in only a few billion years evolved trousers and ornamental stripey hats. Lastly the game of Crocket. And there, magically reincarnated, was Vimes, a little dizzy, standing on the village green looking into the smiling countenance of an enthusiast.
I like “Good Omens,” but I think that, unlike the Discworld books, it has gotten a bit dated. There are a lot of references to movies, technology, and various fads that don’t resonate quite as much as they used to.
So does anyone in the UK still use ansaphones or is it all voicemail like everyone else now?