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IshmaelZarkov posted:Seconded. Mort is a great intro to the Disc. Equal rites is also a good intro. Boxturret posted:Start with whichever one has the most interesting cover then read the rest in a completely random order. And also this.
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Jan 27, 2021 06:44
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Colour of Magic and Light Fantastic are almost pure parody of a crude form even beyond later parody-esque books (like Soul Music) where there's enough character going on to drive things. They're good enough if you recognize the things being mocked, but aren't really representative of the rest and tend to be harder reads without character/satire helping to keep things moving.
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Jan 27, 2021 07:30
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Boxturret posted:I think the weirdest bit in the first two books is when Death just kills that random guy out of frustration. He was going to die then anyway, Death just felt like making a gesture. Trying to fit in.
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Jan 27, 2021 07:55
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The Luggage is the funniest thing Pratchett ever came up with and you can all fight me on this. The second funniest thing is Mount Oolskunrahod.
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Jan 27, 2021 09:03
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El Fideo posted:The second funniest thing is Mount Oolskunrahod.
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Jan 27, 2021 09:14
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Boxturret posted:I think the weirdest bit in the first two books is when Death just kills that random guy out of frustration. It was before Death was really defined as a character. But in TLF Death recognises that getting frustrated over Rincewind not dying on schedule is pointless and not constructive, and it's arguable that this self-reflection is partly what kicked off the events of Mort.
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Jan 27, 2021 09:24
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El Fideo posted:
gently caress. What's the joke here? Edit: and which book?
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Jan 27, 2021 12:00
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Beachcomber posted:gently caress. What's the joke here? https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Mount_Oolskunrahod
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Jan 27, 2021 12:06
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Gotta go with the full joke.
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Jan 27, 2021 12:08
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immoral_ posted:You could skip it and go to Mort, which is where it starts becoming more Discworld and less high-fantasy trope-a-thon. this
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Jan 27, 2021 15:02
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If you are a fan of old school pulp high fantasy, you can start with The Color of Magic/ The Light Fantastic, since you'd probably get a kick out of the parody stuff. But if you want to start Pratchett because you have heard of the funny quips and the underlying humanistic philosophy, Mort is a better starting point. And honestly, Equal Rights is a pretty rough mix between those two.
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Jan 27, 2021 15:42
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Nthing that I've enjoyed the Colour Of Magic, but it definitely isn't the same Discworld as the later books.
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Jan 27, 2021 15:50
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When I picked up the series just two years ago, I started right from the beginning with The Color of Magic, and then going from there to Light Fantastic and Equal Rites. And while I definitely enjoyed them, my next two after those were Wyrd Sisters and Small Gods, and holy poo poo did it ever feel like absolute night and day between even those later early books and the first three. It was enjoyable to read where it all started, but looking feel like I feel like I could have initially skipped the original three and I would have been just fine.
IBroughttheFunk fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Jan 27, 2021 |
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Jan 27, 2021 15:53
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I started with Night Watch and enjoyed it, although there was a LOT of stuff I didn't quite get. Personally I'd consider starting someone out on Guards! Guards! Colour of Magic / Light Fantastic are enjoyable, but in a completely different way from the others. Whether through over-reading, or just through changing tastes, I've sort of dropped off Discworld over time and gave away most of my books, but I kept Colour of Magic, Light Fantastic, and Night Watch.
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Jan 27, 2021 17:56
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RadicalTranslation posted:I got through about half of Colour of Magic and then stopped. I've been told it's not his best; is it worth plowing through? The best place to start depends on the reader. What else do you like reading?
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Jan 27, 2021 21:15
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My own reading order was whatever I could find at the time so my first book was Light Fantastic, I'd read Men At Arms before Guards Guards and Lords And Ladies before any of the other Witches books. I think they do a pretty good job of being someone's intro to the series.
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Jan 27, 2021 21:51
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immoral_ posted:You could skip it and go to Mort, which is where it starts becoming more Discworld and less high-fantasy trope-a-thon. Mort is also a lovely starting place, imo. While I like Death, I think that he's always gotten sub-par books(with the possible exception of Reaper Man), and I don't think they're properly representative of the rest of the series. Thinking about it, I think that the best entry point is Men at Arms. It's the first Watch book with a 'modern' feel to it, in that all the characters are pegged down and consistent, and the introduction of all the new characters to the Watch also serves to introduce the setting to the reader.
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Jan 27, 2021 21:52
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The Watch is now fully doing its own thing and has pretty much ditched the remnants of Pratchett plots and quotes, and it's all the more compelling for it. Three episodes left, I'm looking forward to see where it goes, but it's really nothing you can fairly talk about in the context of Pratchett adaptations anymore, if it ever was.
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Jan 27, 2021 21:55
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I was limited by what my high school library had so I read Monstrous Regiment first Then Maurice and the Tiffany Aching stories since they were listed as for younger readers so I thought I'd get them done first. Then I read Thud and all the other watch books and the few others they had. I think Men at Arms was the last watch book I read since I had to go out and buy it.
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Jan 27, 2021 22:06
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Gnome de plume posted:My own reading order was whatever I could find at the time so my first book was Light Fantastic, I'd read Men At Arms before Guards Guards and Lords And Ladies before any of the other Witches books. Yep, that was my problem too -- I think the books were printed in a strange order in America. Lords and Ladies was the first Witches book I read too, and Feet of Clay was my first Discworld book and I think the only Guards book available at the bookstore. I remember having to order some of the UK editions online to get the rest of the Witches' backstory, which was no easy feat back in the 90s.
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Jan 27, 2021 22:47
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I started by being gifted The Truth more or less at random. Definitely left me wanting for more.
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Jan 27, 2021 23:05
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I'd start with Guards! Guards! In unrelated news, there's a cool new Youtube series I stumbled across on a channel with, at the moment, 31 subscribers where the guy does reviews/analyses of every single Discworld book and it's actually pretty good. The last book he currently did is Wyrd Sisters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j2vapn3Wrc&list=PLzXQmEXWVjmGXoC7OOalKRucL6-ZdCLyZ&index=1
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Jan 28, 2021 01:45
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Megazver posted:I'd start with Guards! Guards! Cool. I'm enjoying these. Thanks!
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Jan 28, 2021 03:49
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Yeah, I myself started with Men at Arms. Then it was whatever I could get my hands on. Somewhere in my mom's house there's a binder of Pyramids that I printed out in the school library after hours.
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Jan 28, 2021 05:28
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My first Pratchetts were my brother's copies of Truckers etc; so for quite a while my knowledge of Discworld was limited to the names of the first nine or so books as listed on the back pages of the nome books. And from those titles alone my 9-year-old brain built up a very confident and very wrong picture of what this Discworld stuff would be like. Still, I'd love to read some kind of book set in that weird non-existent setting... Beachcomber posted:Somewhere in my mom's house there's a binder of Pyramids that I printed out in the school library after hours. I would love to know about the logistics of this.
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Jan 28, 2021 13:12
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The first Pratchett book I read was Strata, weirdly enough, and i spent a long time trying to figure out it's place in the Discworld universe. (My childhood library had two Pratchett books, Strata and The Colour of Magic, and both were 80's printings with extremely incomplete bibliographies in the back so as far as I knew that and The Carpet people was all he'd ever written) Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Jan 28, 2021 |
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Jan 28, 2021 14:05
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RadicalTranslation posted:I got through about half of Colour of Magic and then stopped. I've been told it's not his best; is it worth plowing through? I've been reading Discworld for 25 years and still haven't managed to finish Colour of Magic. I started with Men At Arms and consider it an excellent entry point.
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Jan 28, 2021 17:07
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Honestly can't remember anymore which book I started with but I know I was buying them (or rather, my parents were buying them for me) on release from about 1996.
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Jan 29, 2021 01:24
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Tree Bucket posted:I would love to know about the logistics of this. Back around the turn of the century, the entire computer infrastructure of our high school was student run, with a faculty "advisor". Things like checking which student account printed 300+ pages on the laserjet over in the dark corner simply didn't happen. And a student who was in the NHS, school newspaper, yearbook, literary magazine, and ΔΕΦ German Language Honor Society, who more or less lived in the library and who checked out more books than any other ten students put together, clearly didn't require any kind of supervision.
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Jan 29, 2021 02:05
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My first Discworld book was Maurice, when I was 15 or so? My mom got it for me because I liked cats. I guess I just assumed that Terry Pratchett was a young adult author and I was clearly an Intelligent Young Man who did not need such things. I only recently got into his other books about a decade ago in my late mid twenties.
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Jan 29, 2021 02:12
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I love that every Pratchett fan has their own elaborate theories of where a new reader should start and in what order they should proceed, but we all just read a random mishmash in whatever order was convenient at the time. Tempted to say that maybe assembling one’s own view of the larger Discworld storyline, chaotically and piecemeal, is in fact the definitive approach!
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Jan 29, 2021 16:49
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Going Postal is the perfect entry book. It's fairly standalone compared to most of the later works, it has chapters so it won't scare people off immediately, it's hilarious, and one of the major themes is how high the internet bill was compared to the shittiness of service, which was relatable in 2004 and haunting in 2021. Also Reacher Gilt was supposed to be some kind of Randian parody of a man who had a monopoly on the Telecom network and kept jacking up prices and deferring maintenance and getting people killed in the process, all while dressing like a pirate and talking about freedom. Once he was a parody and now there are probably a dozen people just like him on Twitter.  Actually you should start by reading The Truth, all about the importance of newspapers and spreading true information in the face of unfounded rumors and lies and how easily they shape our politics and how the privileged abuse the ignorance of the masses for power.  Start with Thief of Time, it has chocolate and martial arts.
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Jan 29, 2021 17:19
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Nah, Thief of Time is a bad place to start, it’s got Susan (her last appearance?) and lots of other concepts that you should probably know first. It’s like Night Watch for the Death books.
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Jan 29, 2021 17:22
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It was my third Discworld book after Going Postal and Night Watch, it works fine.
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Jan 29, 2021 17:24
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I was about to say, my only ~rules~ for reading order are (a) don't read Night Watch until you've read the earlier Watch books; and (b) don't read Thief of Time until after Hogfather at a minimum.YggiDee posted:It was my third Discworld book after Going Postal and Night Watch, it works fine. 
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Jan 29, 2021 17:24
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Publication order or bust
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Jan 29, 2021 17:43
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The Discworld books do a pretty good job of introducing each character and what their deal is on every new book. I knew I was probably missing out on some injokes or whatever from previous installments but I still felt like I was getting the proper meat of the story. But also I am one of those chronic rereaders so I knew I'd be able to come back later with more context. Also Night Watch is probably one of the easiest ones to read out of order because it's almost exclusively about Vimes. You don't have to ask too many questions about Carrot or Cheery or Angua or Detritus because they have, collectively, five pages to work with. Sixty percent of that book takes place in Vimes' brain.
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Jan 29, 2021 17:55
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Yeah he always did a good job at showing who a character was even if they only appeared very briefly, so it was less confusion over someone seeming to have undue importance given to them despite a small part in the book and more you get a nice surprise later on when you read a book that features them more prominently. Like for me The Truth was one of the later books I read, so getting to see Otto as a full major character was really cool, having already seen little glimpses of him in a few other books
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Jan 29, 2021 18:08
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Tree Bucket posted:My first Pratchetts were my brother's copies of Truckers etc; so for quite a while my knowledge of Discworld was limited to the names of the first nine or so books as listed on the back pages of the nome books. And from those titles alone my 9-year-old brain built up a very confident and very wrong picture of what this Discworld stuff would be like. The trucker trilogy was the only books I hadn’t read by Pratchett and reading them after Shepherds felt like coming full circle. Still great after all these years.
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Jan 29, 2021 18:25
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I got into Discworld by reading a video game magazine that also had a tabletop RPG corner. The guy running it would, in the context of articles and letters to the mag, chat to readers about pretty much anything fantasy related, book recommendations came up and Discworld kept being a thing in the replies. So eventually I picked one up. Small Gods, by the way.
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Jan 29, 2021 18:52
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