Discworld reading order guide

I bow to your superior emoticon use :o

Lol I never noticed that

Because someone really dislikes colour blind people :P

comedy

I’m considering that for my next read through.

I just finished The Last Continent next up is Carpe Jugulum

There's a lot of opinions on this. I found Small Gods to be a good jumping in place because it's a stand alone book and late enough that he had found the tone he wanted for the series. But a lot of other people recommend picking a subseries and starting with the first book there. The Vimes books are very popular so a lot of people recommend Guards, Guards as a starting point.

The reason a lot of people don't recommend publishing order is that the first two books are written in a very different style to the later ones. They're pretty straight parodies of heroic fantasy. But Pratchett becomes so much more later.

You can do whatever I think, either read them by series (rincewind, witches, city guard, etc.) or by publishing order, starting with the colour of magic.

Mort

What kinds of books do you like? Different 'series' have different connecting themes and are asking different sorts of questions. Any types of themes in stories you are drawn to?

The night watch, if you enjoy detective mystery

I think starting with Color of Magic is just fine, IF you know and enjoy classic heroic fantasy. Otherwise it's very hard to enjoy without understanding what tropes it's mocking.

They’re very different from the rest so it makes sense. IMO you’ve really got 4 eras: The first two, the era where he’s got an idea of what he wants but it’s still forming and being explored (pre industrial, lots of new stuff, characters change a lot as he explores them), his stride (longer series, less satirical, beginning to display his feelings on people as a whole), and then the embuggerance books (frustrated and powerful stories that leave very little of himself held back). They definitely bleed into each other, but there’s a reason Snuff feels a lot more like I Shall Wear Midnight in tone than it does to Guards Guards.

I think what he’s really saying is “don’t start with the books that came with an assumption that this was a one off parody, start where it’s being written as a series meant to evolve, then when you have a feel for it go read them”

I also read them in Roundworld chronological order and was thrilled with them, but looking back as an adult I can see where the guy who wrote Thud! and Dodger might not be entirely proud of the first couple.

I tried reading Color of Magic and hated it.

That was the first one I read, and it got me hooked. Very good stand alone book with minimal references to the rest of the series.

my personal favorite after decades of dedicated fandom, and self-contained enough that it's one I recommend everyone start with.

The opposite. There's no need to read all of them. Each is self contained. So this amount just means you have a lot more to consume of you liked them

Not only is each self-contained, but I have found that each "sub-series"- if I can call them that- has a different vibe from the other, and are oftentimes entirely unrelated. So it's not like you're missing out on part of the story you were reading in Mort and Reaper Man by not reading a Rincewind book. Not many people actually read every book anyway.

Should be the opposite, there's a lot of options for where to start.

Just read Small Gods, which is fully self-contained and incidentally my favorite. If you like it, pick up another one and go from there. Most of the books are relatively short but all the ones I've read so far are amazing.

I think pterry was personally fond of Rincewind as a character, which may have influenced this recommendation.

I asked Pratchett's ghost. He said it didn't matter.

Mort.

Small Gods was mine. If I'd started with the Rincwind books I might never have finished any of them.

Mine was "Eric"

Young Adult.

The Tiffany Aching books are a young adult subseries that spins off from the witches series. Very much worth reading even if you're not huge on YA stuff, especially since they essentially finish off the witches storyline.

As others have said "Young Adult," but they're not significantly different from the rest of the series imo. Protagonist in most is a child versus adults as in the rest of the books and they lack the off-color jokes and occasional swearing of the main series. Stories in the YA novels are about the same level of complexity as the others, and the violence is about the same, too.

One reader's opinion.

You’re putting too much pressure on it.

I had the same issue, until I realised it was just a series of novels, with sarcastically minded, modern characters, that happened to be in a fantasy setting.

So they’re able and willing to point out the obvious absurdity of the world and its rules. To the extent that the world is flat, and floating on the back of a turtle. And everyone on the planet knows and accepts this as fact, because it’s literally true.

And he was one of the first to do this. Douglas Adam’s did a similar thing with space in A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy around the same time.

Now, with all of that in mind, if you don’t like the guys writing style, no amount of love from other people can ever force you to enjoy it.

I'd love to know where to start (Discworld) as a old school hard scifi reader.

For the science fiction side of Discworld, check out the "History monks" path:

• Small Gods, Thief of Time, Night Watch

I personally include "Pyriamids" in that series, even though it technically doesn't have any history monks in it.

At that point, if you enjoyed the cop stories in Night Watch, you're in luck, beacuse:

As a science fiction fan, keep in mind that, while Discworld has consistent "science" rules, they're still intentionally silly. It is called "Discworld", after all.

But if you accept that Discworld is a shared delusion, with no explained origin, after that it's effectively hard science fiction. In my head canon, Discworld is "The Matrix" after a few centuries of missed maintenance patches.

Edit: After those, if the style appeals, the next to check out (for a science fiction fan) is probably the "Industrial Revolution" sequence.

I personally save "Moving Pictures" for last when I read theough it, because I'm impatient to get to the Moist Von Lipwig stories.

Also, the earlier "Death" stories have a sci-fi horror vibe.

If you love hard sci fi it’s not a given you’ll love it. If you love Douglas Adams and enjoy fantasy you should like it. It’s philosophical and deep and deeply silly.

So if you want to give it a fair shake and didn’t like it before, try Thud or Lords and Ladies. They’re in the middle of a series so I don’t recommend most people starting there and there’s context you’re going to be missing but are funny, smart, and powerful. I don’t know anybody who ranks either as one of their least favorite discworld books. And if you don’t like it, consider maybe it’s just not to your tastes as a series. It’s a powerful series filled with angst and hope and love of humanity, but it’s also silly stories about a flat world where fantasy tropes are turned on their heads. That’s what we love it for, but if you don’t like that then you don’t like it.

And for an example, Night Watch is Les Mis where the cop is the good guy who’s standing up for the people. Wyrd Sisters is Hamlet where the witches are heroic and the fool is painfully prudent. There’s Phantom of the Opera with a fat witch trying to be edgy, theres a story about a known con man being forced to run a post office and another where he has to run the treasury. There’s an “oops all Mulan” book too. These premises are played as silly as they are but also as deep as they can be.

For me the fantasy takes a backseat to the social commentary. Pratchett is great when he is angry and trying to shake the stupid and mean out of people.