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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

It’s good right up until the last two books or so (thinking specifically of Snuff, but also Raising Steam here), where Vimes becomes a complete parody of himself, and there is also a large drop in quality.

Maybe Pratchett’s disease had something to do with it.

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.

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.

Mort.

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

Mine was “Eric”

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

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.