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My reading order was “whatever looked interesting based on title, back cover, and library/bookstore availability,” and I can vouch for that being a totally fine order, even when no bookstore has Feet of Clay and you spend months hunting for it. I think Equal Rites was my first, but The Truth and Thief of Time (which I bought in hardcover from an outlet mall for a combined $8) were the ones that really sold me.SimonChris posted:Color of Magic may have some rough edges, but I will always maintain that competent, streetwise, linguist Rincewind was a far more interesting character than the flanderized stereotype he turns into later. He also seems to be something of a natural scientist who immediately figures out the workings of an actual camera and rants about wanting a different kind of magic to bring order to the Discworld. When he is briefly transported into a modern world pocket dimension, he turns into Dr. Rjinswand, a successful nuclear physicist. It’s been an age since I reread Colour of Magic, but isn’t it strongly implied that he’s a bit of a fraud even as Rjinswand?
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Mar 13, 2023 16:20
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Jedit posted:It goes back to Jingo, so I'm not seeing what the complaint is. The whole joke in Jingo, though, is that war is so desperate and dehumanizing that it can turn even Vimes’s stereotypical butler, who had never done anything more violent than slice a ham, into an ear-biting psychopath. The later books change him into having always been the psychopath, before Vimes ever met him, to the point where in Snuff he’s killing Vimes’s enemies so Vimes doesn’t have to suffer the moral compromise of doing it himself. We can argue whether this was a good change (pre-Thud Willikins was walking wallpaper, while post-Thud he can have conversations with Vimes), but it’s definitely a change in how the character was written. Willikins tags along during Fifth Elephant, remember, and there’s no indication that Vimes views him as an asset in a fight there the way he does Cheery or Detritus.
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Dec 24, 2023 14:27
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Osmosisch posted:Things I strongly dislike about it: I noticed this a fair bit in the later books, where the narrative would grind to a halt so a character could give a long monologue about how they were right and everyone else was going to shut up and listen to them because they’re at the end of their patience. I remember Snuff being especially bad about it — you could maybe get away with that from someone like Vimes or Granny who has, in some sense, earned our trust, but not from a pissant like Feeney who’s appearing on the page for the first time and hadn’t exactly given the best account of themselves when they were here.
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Apr 14, 2024 14:43
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