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

It also seems the color for “young adult novel” isn’t used at all.

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.

Witches look self-contained. For the rest, pick a group and read up to before the series crossover, then proceed to the next series's starting book

Mort

The books represented by the orange dots are typically recommended starting points between fans. They start some of the more popular longer running character arcs.

That said, every book is a solid stand-alone story. No story requires reading more than the book it is in.

The night watch, if you enjoy detective mystery

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?

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 tried reading Color of Magic and hated it.

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.

Meh, read 'em in order. I was all but done with the series when I saw posts like this.

You can read them any which way you like. I started with Hogfather because it sounded wild. If you go in order you catch more of the jokes and characters from the previous books.

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.

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.

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

Basically, while all of the novels take place in the discworld, different books in the series focus on different groups of characters, making it so that there are different subseries within the series. A lot of people choose to read the subseries in order instead of going through the books in publication order. This is also because the first two books, while not bad, have a very different tone from the later books. They're kind of straight parodies of heroic fantasy rather than being more focused on the unique setting and characters within the discworld.

So most people would recommend starting with one of the major subseries. The city watch books start with Guards Guards (this is probably the most popular subseries). The witches start with Equal Rites. Death starts with Mort. And Rincewind starts with The Color of Magic. Or you could pick one of the stand alone books to get a taste of Pratchett's style without continuity. Small Gods is probably the best choice for this IMO.

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

This one?

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/terry-pratchetts-discworld-harpercollins-books

Sad it doesn't have quite all of them.

Hmm looks like it's just missing Raising Steam?

And it looks like it's through kobo.com? Do you just get the files or have to use their site/app?

Edit: looks like these books can only be downloaded as .ascm files. DRM-managed adobe files. Very lame.

Welp I just burned $18 as I'm absolutely not going to use Adobe Digital Editions or the Kobo app to read books. Humble's "Use on Any Device" is an absolute lie.

Mine was "Eric"

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

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.

Mort.

But... That's not complete story? You stopped half way through.

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.

What did you read last time?