Why give them unique shapes in the legend and then proceed to NOT use them in the actual diagram? ,`:•|
I’m one of those heathens that read through for the first time in publication order. The ancient civilization side trips were a bit disorienting at first but I managed.
Ok but where do I start?
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.
That’s where I started. Wouldn’t have had it any other way. What a great book.
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.
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
Witches aren’t bad to start it’s where I did. But I recommend ending with Tiffany Aching. The shepherds crown wasn’t intended to be the final book, he was writing until he died and would’ve kept going if he could’ve, but it is the perfect final book.
I’d say start with Rincewind, Witches, or Death. City Watch is good too but it’ll hit you hard with Industrial Revolution stuff and is very much the story of the world progressing as people try to deal with it.
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.
That said, every book is a solid stand-alone story. No story requires reading more than the book it is in.
Yeah, I will mention that at the time I started reading them, availability of the series in the US was pretty spotty so I read a lot of the books out of order. I didn’t find it impacted my enjoyment. Some of the later books have more continuity, particularly the later watch books, but I think the majority of them could be read in any order without too much problem.
I was the weird one and started with The Color of Magic and didn’t regret it. Weird Pratchett advised to skip 2 of his own books.
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”
Don’t sleep on Small Gods, it’s incredibly good.
