“But I’m me.”
Amazing ending.
10% into Guards! Guards! and I’ve laughed a lot. Very funny beginning.
I am the odd one out here a little bit, because a friend tried to get me into Discwold YEARS ago by saying “No no, you’ve GOT TO READ Small Gods” and I did and I thought it was… well, I didn’t like it very much. I only got into Discworld after more-or-less accidentally reading Equal Rites and Men at Arms, the latter of which is the one that really hooked me.
The Tiffany Aching books are AMAZING. Honestly, they’re BETTER than a lot of the ‘core’ Discworld stuff, which ranges in quality from “thoroughly meh” to “stellar” while the Tiffany books bump up against stellar every time.
Glad you like it! I was going to suggest Men At Arms, but Guards! Guards! is chronologically first, so may suit some people better. Men At Arms should be next. Feet of Clay is the next logical stop.
I am a proponent of what I call the “Middle Pratchett” theory - where the “early Pratchett” Discworld books are before he really found his feet and started to write this stuff “seriously” rather than as a sort of series of jokes in a parody fantasy universe. You can see him starting to think more about what this stuff MEANS to people living in the world. But when you start getting into “Later Pratchett” the amount of actual humor in the books is actually pretty low, and it’s mostly a somewhat sly, wry view of actual real-people problems viewed through a vaguely fantasy colored lens. For me, Middle Pratchett extends from roughly the Small Gods/Witches Abroad era through… right about Night Watch, and the books on the edges definitely show where things are coming from and going to.
Now, see, a lot of us like real-people problems viewed through a vaguely fantasy colored lens. The underlying point is that fundamentally, people are people.
Though it is nice to have some overt fantasy like witches or dragons in the mix, too.
Sure. The question is just what admixture of humor you want in it. I found the later books to be too raw. The middle books still DID this, but there was more entertainment in it.