+++Divide by Cucumber Error. Please Re-Install Universe And Reboot+++

Cafe Society
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Or, Raven has discovered Discworld, twenty years after everyone else.

Well, not quite, seeing as I wasn’t born twenty years ago, but I’m definitely slow off the mark on this one. I’d read and enjoyed all of Terry Pratchett’s non-Discworld novels (Good Omens, the Bromeliad, the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy, etc) and it had simply never occurred to me before that I might like Discworld. But it has, and I do. Like it, that is. I’ve now read Pyramids, Mort, The Fifth Elephant and Hogfather, and I’m a few pages into Night Watch. I haven’t got the luxury of reading them in any kind of order, as I have no money to buy books at present, and so I’m attempting to borrow them from various sources. It seems that once you’ve announced your intention to read the entire Discworld canon, people fall over themselves to help you. All kinds of inter-library loans have been conducted on my behalf, and even my form tutor, who had never said more than a sentence to me before, offered to root through his garage and give me whichever ones he found. Therefore, I have Witches Abroad and Interesting Times to read once I’ve finished Night Watch.

In short, this is fun. I’m very much a fan of Death (I was pleasantly surprised to find the Death of the Discworld is different from the Good Omens version of him) and even more so of Susan Sto-Helit. Hogfather, therefore, is my favourite of the ones I’ve read, although I did like the Fifth Elephant. The characters of the Watch stuck in my head, particularly Carrot. I’m not sure I understand the way he is

the redundant heir to the throne of Ankh-Morpork.

What else did I want to mention? Oh… yes, the wizards of Unseen University. I read Hogfather on the train, mostly, and had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing at Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons and Hex. Particularly Hex. And the Bursar and his dried frog pills. And everything else. The point of this post is to just to squee a bit and ask opinions as to which books I should try to get hold of next. And I wouldn’t mind being told anything I absolutely must know about Discworld, and I’d like to know what the Millennium Hand Shrimp thing is, and just general stuff like that. Oh, and do any of the other books have Hex in them?

I could probably go on all night, so I’ll stop.

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You have to understand that because you’re not reading them in published order, some things will possibly confuse. The characters aren’t constant. The Wizards, especially, change quite a bit from the earlier books to the later. Different wizards, somewhat different personalities of the present wizards. A different Patrician in some of the earlier books (or at least a Patrician who isn’t recognizably Vetinari).

Hex is a fairly recent addition, if I remember correctly. Within the last four or five books, anyway.

“Millenium hand and shrimp” came from a computer poetry-writing program that Pratchett had. He’d put just about anything at hand in the input bin, including a Chinese take-out menu lying on his desk. It spat out the usual babble, but Terry liked the line “Millenium hand and shrimp”.

Oh, btw, The L-Space Web is your soon-to-be best friend… :smiley:

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Small Gods. Kinda like if Good Omens took place on the Discworld. Far and away my favorite Disc novel.

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Welcome Loneraven, to the wonderful, hilarious, quite insightful Discworld.

Pratchett is simply the best author alive.

Watch for Monstrous Regiment. The artwork for the spine foil stamping die came through my hands Thursday, so I know it’ll be on the shelf in just a few days.

What a great thread for my 2000th post.

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For those who appreciate such things, I have been known to package margarita flavored Jelly Belly beans and label them as dried frog pills, and include instructions on when and how to take them (When the voices in your head tell you to, or whenever the world gets to be too much).

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I noticed that Pterry realy ties everything together lately. I don’t remeber in which book, but when Ridcully asked if someone had “gone completely Bursar”, it was a moment to treassure.

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And in The Fifth Elephant, when Nobby realized how angry Vimes would be with the situation when he returned from Uberwald, said “he’ll go completely Librarian Poo.”

I loved that line.

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Me, a discworld fan (duh) thought that subject quote was from one of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide books.

I discovered it late too, 23ish. I am a big huge massive fan of Sam Vimes and the Watch.

For some reason I want to mention a favourite recently read part of the current-but-one book I am reading - the bit where Detritus is trapped in the meat warehouse.

(warning - no wit in spoiler. just a boring explanation)

the colder a troll gets, the more intelligent

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I must read Small Gods again, to find out what on earth posessed me to choose this lousy username.

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Somehow, Lobsang, I had always figured you’d taken your name from Paul Davies’ The Truth, which I thought was pretty cool. (That Lobsang is an englishman who falls out of a tree and thereafter insists that he is a Tibetan monk who is merely inhabiting the former plumber’s body, which he parlays into a successful career as an author. The book is full of pleasing and humorous synchronicities, and has some entertaining math, with is always a plus. Parts of it seem to me like what Dirk Gently would have been like if Douglas Adams was more of a nerd, if you can imagine such a thing.)

Searching for that link, by the way, I noticed that there is a Discworld novel with the same title.

Funny, that.

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That’s cool. I’ll feel a bit better about my name now (I always suspected it had non-discworld links to buddhism and tibetan monks, but wasn’t sure what the connection was)

I have ‘The Truth’ (the discworld one) and it looks like I’ll get the other one too, based on your description.
Actually another reason I disliked the name was suspecting that it meant something other than a discworld character, and that I was saying something about myself that I am not aware I am saying.

But if it turnes out all the ‘meanings’ of ‘Lobsang’ are positive ones then I’ll think twice next time I curse it for not being ‘Samuel Vimes’ or some variation of the person.

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Well, I feel better now. I peeled the label off my bottle of multivitamins and labeled it “Dried Frog Pills” with a Sharpie … I had thought myself a total geek for doing that, but now I see I’m not alone. :smiley:

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I’ve been reading Discworld for about 20 years now. I used to be a member of a bookclub and The Light Fantastic was a selection. I bought that and The Colour of Magic and have been reading ever since.

Small Gods is also my favorite and it has the added bonus of not having a lot of continuity with the other books so that you won’t be quite as confused.

I don’t think anyone answered your Captain Carrot question.

Carrot was found by dwarves after his family was killed (by bandits I think). He was raised as a dwarf (this is mentioned in quite a few books) and eventually came to Ahnk-Morpork to serve in the Watch (see Gaurds! Gaurds!). Carrot has a strawberry birthmark as well which is some kind of family trait of the former royalty of Ahnk-Morpork. Also, the dwarves who found him found a sword which is supposed to belong to the monarchy.

I may have got a detail wrong, but that’s essentially correct.

And Hex first shows up in Soul Music.

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Constable Visit (Visit-The-Ungodly-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets) follows The Book of Om, which I think is a nice nod to Small Gods, Om now being treated as a Proper God, and no longer just a frustrated tortoise.

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But none of the major characters are major characters in other books.

Om and Brutha are mentioned in a few other books and some of the philosphers can also be seen in Pyramids. That’s about it.

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Small Gods is set quite a long time before the ‘series’ books, I think. I’m basing this on the fact that in Carpe Jugulum there’s a mention of Brutha’s second letter to the Omnians, or something like that. And the AM, Death and Witches series all seem to be set within the same time.

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There’s conflicting evidence of when Small Gods is set.

Besides the example you gave, there’s a part in The Thief of Time where someone claims that the Prophet Brutha was 100 years previsouly.

However, in Small Gods, Brutha meets several philosophers who were also in Pyramids. In Pyramids, Pteppic went to the assassin school with Dr. Cruses who also appears in Men at Arms.

Check this out.

http://www.us.lspace.org/books/timeline/dw-timeline-smallgods.html

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That link is an ex-link, I think. A thousand curses - it looked interesting

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No, the link still works. Just remove the extra http:// .
Here, I’ll do it for you:

www.us.lspace.org/books/timeline/dw-timeline-smallgods.html

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I see two explanations:
A:) It was established in SG that the Assassin’s guild can be a family business. It would therefore not be unreasonable to assume that there were two Dr. Cruces at two different times.

B:) Lu-Tze did it.