Poll of the Day > Should i read the Discworld novels?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I keep hearing about them, and Im kinda curious now.

Death seems pretty cool.
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I've enjoyed most of the ones I've read so far, but after 7 or 8 I took a break. I like Pratchett's humor, but after reading too many too quickly it gets to a "yeah, I get it" point and I had to switch it up for a while.
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If you like fantasy novels in general, you'll probably like Discworld, because they spend a lot of time making fun of fantasy novel cliches. The early books are build almost entirely around parody, though the series slowly evolves into its own thing, and tells some pretty strong stories about some very likeable characters.

If you're not a fan of fantasy in general, though, you might not get much out of them.

One other thing to keep in mind, though, is that the books switch focus between different groups of characters. So even if, for instance, you find yourself hating Rincewind, you might find yourself way more interested in the City Guard novels. Or the Witch novels. Or the ones with Susan, or Moist von Lipwig. And so on. So don't discount the entire series if you find yourself disliking one of the main characters. There isn't a huge amount of continuity between the books, so you can always just skip books with that character in the future and read the others instead (considering there's like 40+ books in the series total, there'll be plenty of other books you might like).


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The Night Watch is good, as is Jingo. And there's several movies which are pretty decent (Hogfather as well as The Colour of Magic/The Light Fantastic)
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Perhaps this may be of use. There is a better version I can recall seeing, but my google-fu is off tonight.

https://imgur.com/a/jb8j31B

Personally, I think the witch novels are the weakest link but there are still one or two good ones in that batch as well.

@Entity13, get your ass in here, this topic is squarely within your wheelhouse.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

https://imgur.com/a/jb8j31B

This is kind of needlessly overcomplicated, and could potentially discourage potential new readers to the point where they'll just give up and not read anything.

The books are fine if you just read them in publishing order. Which basically every book has printed in it for reference. It works just fine that way (and arguably, it's better than trying to construct complicated counter-intuitive orders for them). People always try to make the order of larger series more complicated than it needs to be.

It's why I always get a bit annoyed when people suggest things like reading the Narnia books or watching the Star Wars movies in chronological order rather than publishing order. They weren't originally designed for that, and I think you absolutely lose some of the nuance when you do it that way. Just read/watch in the order they came out and everything is fine.

For Discworld, it's easiest just to tell people to read the books in order, and maybe skip ahead a bit if they don't like Rincewind or the parody tone of the early books (specifically, I usually suggest to anyone who doesn't like The Colour of Magic to skip ahead to Wyrd Sisters or Guards! Guards! instead. Mostly just Guards! Guards!, because I think the City Watch books are easily the strongest in the series). The book list on Wikipedia is perfectly acceptable for that purpose - it lists every book in order, and even tells you who the lead characters are so you can decide if you want to skip a given book:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld#Novels


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I've found that series hit and miss. Generally speaking I've enjoyed the Rincewind, Ancient Civilisations, Death and Industrial Revolution novels but have found the Witches and Watch novels very boring.
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No do not read them theyre haunted
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Some are really good (my favorite is Going Postal). Some are absolute shit (I'm looking at you, Soul Music).
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I highly reccomend that you do if you like satire.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

WhiskeyDisk posted...

https://imgur.com/a/jb8j31B

This is kind of needlessly overcomplicated, and could potentially discourage potential new readers to the point where they'll just give up and not read anything.

The books are fine if you just read them in publishing order. Which basically every book has printed in it for reference. It works just fine that way (and arguably, it's better than trying to construct complicated counter-intuitive orders for them). People always try to make the order of larger series more complicated than it needs to be.

It's why I always get a bit annoyed when people suggest things like reading the Narnia books or watching the Star Wars movies in chronological order rather than publishing order. They weren't originally designed for that, and I think you absolutely lose some of the nuance when you do it that way. Just read/watch in the order they came out and everything is fine.

For Discworld, it's easiest just to tell people to read the books in order, and maybe skip ahead a bit if they don't like Rincewind or the parody tone of the early books (specifically, I usually suggest to anyone who doesn't like The Colour of Magic to skip ahead to Wyrd Sisters or Guards! Guards! instead. Mostly just Guards! Guards!, because I think the City Watch books are easily the strongest in the series). The book list on Wikipedia is perfectly acceptable for that purpose - it lists every book in order, and even tells you who the lead characters are so you can decide if you want to skip a given book:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld#Novels

I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but I do have the feeling that Ent is the best resource on the subject, hence my summoning. I'm pretty sure Entity has literally read them all so I'm just going with what I regard as the final word on the subject.

Personally, I don't really think Pratchett was trying to take the piss on the whole fantasy thing anywhere near as hard as Jim Baker was trying to because despite Pratchett dying and all, nobody is crying about any possible unfinished novels, whereas Jim is very much alive and well and holding back on the very much hyped Post Apocalypse Trilogy which might only be behind the next JRRM novel in terms of anticipation... Pratchett never managed to back himself into a corner, and at.least JRRM has left clues and DOS disks should he die abruptly. The thing that worries me most about the Dresden files novels is that in the event of an unforseen car crash we may end up with the sort of thing Doug Adams kids have hacked together post mortem.

At least Pratchett had an unreasonably large canon by the time he'd passed...
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Some of them, sure. Just not alot of them.

Have you read any Walter Moers? Pure 10X awesomeness.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but I do have the feeling that Ent is the best resource on the subject, hence my summoning. I'm pretty sure Entity has literally read them all so I'm just going with what I regard as the final word on the subject.

You do realize that I've also read all of the books multiple times, right?

I forget the exact timing of things, but I rented the Discworld point-and-click adventure game in the mid-90s, which led me to start tracking down the books. I kind of jumped in around the middle (I think I read Soul Music and Small Gods and maybe another book or two before going back to the beginning and reading them in order), but after I was into it I read each new book as it came out.

I've also read some of his other books, like Strata and Good Omens. And I've got The Discworld Companion. And the Discworld RPG. Both books.

I'm definitely not going to argue that my having read all the books means I definitively know more about the subject than anyone else, or imply that my opinion is inherently better than anyone else's solely because of it, but it's not as if Entity is the only one who's read them.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

Personally, I don't really think Pratchett was trying to take the piss on the whole fantasy thing anywhere near as hard

The first couple books literally feel like he just made a list of every fantasy cliche he could think of, and then wrote something to make fun of it. Whether he's riffing on LotR, or making fun of the Anne McCaffrey Pern novels (the Wyrmberg), or the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories (Ankh-Morpork basically starts out as a thin copy of Lankhmar, and characters called Bravd and the Weasel show up at one point), most of Color of Magic and Light Fantastic is straight-up parody. He even admitted that it was the sole reason he started writing the books in the first place.

It's not until Mort that he really starts moving away from that sort of mentality, and I'd argue that Guards! Guards! is the book where the series really fully becomes its own thing and leaves a lot of that parody behind. The books still occasionally make fun of fantasy tropes, but after that they're almost entire devoted to telling really strong stories in the setting first, and the parody becomes more of an afterthought.


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I'm not trying to shit on you PO, calm down man, but I haven't had hours of conversations with you about Discworld, whereas I have with Entity. I don't want to get in the middle of a nerd pissing match here, I've just had more convos in the past on the subject with Ent.

As much as I'd like to shit on Pern, I haven't read much of the books and my main entrance into fantasy past Tolkien were Weiss and Hickman novels or Terry Brooks and his Shanarah books.

Dragonlance gets all the love but I'll go to the grave wishing Darksword got more exposition...
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If you can find a good condition copy of the series then check it out. It's largely Pratchett's humor regarding magic, death, and various plots. I wouldn't recommend reading all in one sitting, though. Like do one or two books, read another thing, then another Discworld book or two, and so on, with constant breaks for other writing styles. That's basically the same advice I have for Brandon Sanderson novels, really.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

I'm not trying to shit on you PO, calm down man

I'm not saying you are, and I'm not flipping tables or tearing down curtains over here or anything, but I'm just pointing out that it's kind of off to use "literally read them all" as a reason to prefer someone else's opinion when I've also literally read them all.

You're free to value Entity's opinion more because you've both talked about stuff before, or because you both have really close opinions about a lot of things, or because my surly grumpiness makes you sad, or whatever. I'm not bovvered.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

Dragonlance gets all the love but I'll go to the grave wishing Darksword got more exposition...

I preferred the Death Gate Cycle books the most myself. But with those I'm glad they never wrote more than the original series, because everything was self-contained and the ending was really appropriate. Anything more would have made the rest of the books lessened.

Dragonlance almost feels like it might have been better if they'd just quit after Chronicles and Legends, and not kept writing the dozens of novels that followed for the next 80 years of narrative (and which included like two or three more apocalypses). But I feel the same about a lot of licensed genre trash fiction - the Drizzt novels feel like they'd have been better if Salvatore had stopped after the Icewind Dale and Dark Elf trilogies... but both of those franchises are tied to D&D, so he'll be writing those books until he's dead.

If anything, it's kind of surprising they haven't keep churning out Dragonlance books as well - I'm assuming the last couple must have done poorly, because they've kind of dropped interest in anything that isn't Faerun both in the game itself as well as the tie-in books.


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I even tried to drag my old dnd crew to Thimhallan but they weren't having any of it, despite kij vines being about the best nuisance to a player ever devised, lol.
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Definitely worth the read. Usually when I start someone off on reading them, I start them with Mort. You can start at the beginning if you would like, I just felt that the first few were a little slow. I don't think he hit his stride until after Equal Rites. I would say top favorite books were: Reaper Man, Last Continent, Thief of Time, and Carpe Jugulum.
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