…where should I start?
I keep seeing the Terry Pratchett references here, so while I was killing time in a bookstore last night, I looked at the sci-fi section, and found a bajillion and a half titles by him (or her?).
Please, don’t scare me off by acting like whacked out groupies – but what would be a good title to start with?
Guards, Guards! is a good start. It’s the introductory story to the Watch, which is one of the more fun story lines Pratchett has. I believe the first Witches story is Equal Rights. Not many people seem to like him, but I enjoy Rincewinds’ stories (except for Eric), so The Color of Magic is my first real suggestion. It’s the first of the Discworld books, so everything’s still a little rough around the edges, but still a fun read. It’s a little awkward going back after reading more flushed out stories of the characters, such as Death, so it’s a good place to pick up, and then you get to enjoy the developement of the characters as you go on.
Small Gods is probably my favorite book of his, and it’s a stand alone story in the Discworld with little relation to any of the other books/characters/events, so that’s another really good one to start off with. I’d go Small Gods then Color of Magic, or Guards, Guards! in that order of selection.
Like Elvis says, there are a few places to start, depending on what you want:
The Colour of Magic is the first Discworld book - it is funny, but in a much less subtle way than later books. Rincewind, the main character, also appears in **The Light Fantastic, Eric, Sourcery, Interesting Times, The Fifth Continent and The Last Hero.
Guards! Guards! is the start of the watch series (followed by Men-At-Arms, Feet of Clay, The Fifth Elephant and Night Watch. This is a very good series, filled with very subtle humour (as well as a bit of slapstick thrown in).
Equal Rites sort of starts off the witches series, but only stars one of the witches. The three witches first appear together in Wyrd Sisters followed by Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies and Carpe Jugulum
Mort is the first book of the DEATH series, followed by Reaper Man, Soul Music and Hogfather
In short, if you like slapstick humour, go for Rincewind. If you like what we could loosely call ‘political satire’ or ‘film noir-spoof’ humour, go for City Watch. If you like rural humour or psychological (or headological) humour, try witches. The Death series often has a lot of ‘real-world’ tie-ins, although this is common in many TP books.
Apart from these, there are also a number of ‘stand-alone’ books, which feature characters that only appear in that book. Any of these would be good if you want to just read one book to get an idea of Pterry’s style. (Although none of the ‘series’ books actaully requires you to have read one of the others)These are:
** pyramids** - quite a good story but not one of my favourites
Small Gods - Good if you like religious humour
The Truth - My favourite of the standalones, highly recommended
I think that covers all of them. Whichever one you pick, go and read the Annotated Pratchett File when you’ve finished, and realise how many jokes you missed…
Like he said, the first ones were really more than a little rough. Pratchett was finding a style and still setting don the details of th Discworld. This means some things don’t absolutely mesh well with later books, though the characters themselves don’t change radically or anything. However, some of the “metaphysics” don’t match, and some details seem to have been changed. Its not biggie. Most authors do this at some point - no one can remember every detail.
Some people like the “barb wire and duct-tape” feel of the first books. Others prefer the smoother polish of the newer books. The middle books tend to have the most footnotes (which are bloody hilarious).
ShadowWarrior,
Where do I find the Annotated Pratchett file? Is it a thread on this board or elsewhere on the net?
J.
Ah, never mind.
Google is my friend.
If you skip around, or start at the end, you’ll surely miss references. He also has a tendency to not re-introduce characters, so you might have no idea who someone is. It’s not fatal to the enjoyment, but it doesn’t help. So I would start at the beginning, then read books in each sub-series in order. For instance, I don’t really like the Witch books, but I have read all the Death and Guards ones.
I thought this was useful too: Pratchett Reading Order
I go with ShadowWarrior’s classification. If you like stock fantasy, the Rincewind ones wil probably suit you, but I find Pratchett at his best when he’s satirizing other genres (whether real-world, movie or mythological): the witches, Death and watch series do this. Personally I’d suggest Wyrd Sisters - a mix of Hamlet and Macbeth - as a good accessible start. My wife recommends Carpe Jugulum, Pratchett’s take on the vapire mythos.
I’m using these handy charts to navigate my way around the Pratchett world.
Thanks to whoever posted this link in that long-ago thread.
I haven’t read them all yet (not even close) but I’d recommend The Color of Magic first because it gives you the most description of Discworld. Then maybe Equal Rites.
I’d advise you to read them in the order Pratchett wrote them, that way you can see the world evolve. It also helps that characters who show up in later books will already be familiar to you, giving the books more consistency.
BTW, Pratchett fans don’t tend to be “whacked out groupies”. This isn’t Star Trek, after all - nobody shows up at conventions (or for jury duty) dressed as Rincewind.
I’d like to dress up as the Luggage! Or maybe Cheery. I’d look great with a beard and a leather mini.
I’ve read and re-read them all at least four times by now.
In the first books, Pterry tries to make the Discworld cosmologically believable. There is stuff going on trying to explain how a flat world would work. It’s kinda annoying and when I first read Colour of Magic it kinda put me off and I didn’t return for a few years. Then I got The Fifth Elephant for a train ride and got hooked. At first I didn’t like the series about the witches, but they grew on me.
Pterry’s books work on many levels - slapstick, satire, humanism in the best sense, trust in man (or rather persons, since there are many species here), political… They can be profound and thoughtprovoking, as well as laughing-out-loud spewing coffee on the pages, slapping your knees funny.
So what order? Why not the order it was written, bearing in mind that it will get better end better as you go along. Few writers can claim to have a steady curve upwards, but Pterry does. And since so many characters do cameos in bokks in other series, and it’s all interlocking, you could do worse than getting it straight from the start. The humuor when DEATH makes a cameo is so much greater then. “I HAVE BEEN TOLD THAT I AM NOT ENOUGH OF A PEOPLE PERSON.”
And you’ll eventually find out where I got my screen name. Woof.
The L-space website http://www.lspace.org/, is probably the best collection and ‘portal’ on the web for Pterry’s work. Just remembered another line:
“Baby orangutans look like surprised coconuts.”
and Maskerade! I knew I had forgotten one, and it’s one of my favourites. Fits in the witches trilogy, just before Carpe Jugulum
I think I’ve finally found my SDMB area of expertise - Pterry Books!
Well, seeing as how you’re correcting yourself, ShadowWarrior, you also forgot Jingo in the Watches stories, right before the Fifth Elephant 
Since everyone else has concentrated on the Discworld, I’ll mention the others.
Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman) is my favourite Pratchett, though some of the references may be a bit specific to 80s\90s Britain. Angels, Demons, the Four Horsemen, Armageddon, lots of Queen, and
The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata are his only real sci-fi, and I know some people don’t like them, though the former is pretty cool. Both take a lot of shots at more serious sci-fi, kind of similar to how the early Discworld books do at serious fantasy.
Then there are the children’s ones, mainly the Johnny and Nomes series. I think they’re wasted on children. Only You Can Save Mankind in particular is great, does sci-fi movies and computer games. Then there’s The Amazing Maurice, going back to the Discworld but basically stand-alone.
Since everyone else has concentrated on the Discworld, I’ll mention the others.
Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman) is my favourite Pratchett, though some of the references may be a bit specific to 80s\90s Britain. Angels, Demons, the Four Horsemen, Armageddon, and lots of Queen.
The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata are his only real sci-fi, and I know some people don’t like them, though the former is pretty cool. Both take a lot of shots at more serious sci-fi, kind of similar to how the early Discworld books do at serious fantasy.
Then there are the children’s ones, mainly the Johnny and Nomes series. I think they’re wasted on children. Only You Can Save Mankind in particular is great, does sci-fi movies and computer games. Then there’s The Amazing Maurice, going back to the Discworld but basically stand-alone.
Curses, the first hadn’t gone through on preview.
(Of course, I’m never sure if it’s better manners to apologise or to avoid taking up more bandwidth by not doing so)
The Discworld series began as a parody/satire of the fantasy genre. The very first book, The Colour of Magic, manages to riff on everyone from Lovecraft to McCaffery. The book literally ends with a cliff-hanger, and the story is continued in The Light Fantastic. So if you’re going to read these books you’ll want to read them together.
As the series progressed, it moved away from spoofing the fantasy genre to using a fantasy setting as a backdrop for satire about…well, pretty much anything you can think of. Most of the novels have a major theme. The books in the Watch sub-series are the most thematically consistent, as all tackle crime, mystery, detective fiction, police procedure, film noir, and political intrigue, although they vary in how serious/silly the story is. Other Discworld books deal with topics ranging from Shakespeare (Wyrd Sisters) to Christmas (Hogfather) to rock and roll (Soul Music) to monotheism (Small Gods). You can usually determine the major theme of the book by reading the back cover. This could be helpful in deciding where to begin. If you’re particularly interested in, say, vampires, Carpe Jugulum might be a good book to start with. It does come late in the Witch sub-series, but although it may be best to read the books in each sub-series in order they all do stand alone.
Each novel also contains a huge number of sly jokes and references to science, history, literature, television, music, and film. Pratchett has said that he often draws on facts he’s learned from our own dear Uncle Cecil! I can guarantee that you will not catch all these jokes yourself, so after you read a book you may want to go through the aforementioned Annotated Pratchett file and see what you missed.
Interestingly, the later Discworld novels have become increasingly less fantasy-oriented. The most recent one, Night Watch, never even mentions that the Discworld is flat and rests on the back of four elephants standing on a giant turtle, there is very little magic, and fantasy characters such as dwarves and trolls do not participate in the main part of the narrative. So if you find fantasy and magic a turn-off you may want to begin with the later books rather than the earlier ones.