this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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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.
I recommend Mort
That's where I started. Wouldn't have had it any other way. What a great book.
The death series and the witches series are both great starting points imo but you really can't go wrong with any point and just meandering around
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.
I heartily agree. It reads like a beautiful capstone on Sir Terry Pratchett's life's work.
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.
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.
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?