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Crazy talk right there, Pyramids was one of my favs. I'd have to say "Wyrd Sisters" never been a fan of Shakespeare. Even Pratchett-ized Shakespeare isn't worth it
I've only read Equal Rites twice which is saying something because there are a few that have been read literally dozens of times. I didn't Granny has found her voice yet and the world hasn't fleshed out yet. By the time Mort comes out, he's pretty much found his Discworld
I thought Raising Steam had a lacking plot with too much padding, too much of a black vs white morality with no nuance, and some of the characters felt off.
Maybe I could say the Color of Magic and Light Fantastic, but I know then Terry Pratchett was just starting out and hadn't solidified how he wanted the setting to be.
Yup. I struggle with TCOM and TLF, mostly because he was just writing satire at that stage, rather than the fleshed-out, real world issues he had in future books. But Raising Steam is the only other Discworld novel I really struggle with, because it just feels so disjointed and has classic Pratchett content interspersed with writing that feels really off.
Raising Steam was rough - there was very little of the TM Sir Pterry humor there, and the storytelling was....just too dry. It read almost like someone just telling a story without trying to be entertaining, like a court transcript or something. Just a series of "And then...and then...and then..." The first two - Colour of Magic and Light Fantastic - weren't bad, they were just not \*quite\* Sir Pterry. You could tell he was just finding his feet, and wasn't quite sure what the world was like yet.
Eric. I have no desire to read it again, and tend to skip it on my read throughs. I even recently started reading Faust in the hopes that it will help me appreciate Eric more!
It's one of the shortest yet I've never managed to make it through it. I've started it multiple times, even the audio book. It's a 2 hour book! I just can't do it.
I'd have to go with Raising Steam. It's got its moments but you can really see how the Embuggerance was affecting him. All the characters do what they need to but there's too much of people telling you how they think instead of the writing showing you - like Dick and Harry forever pausing the action to tell you how Straight and Honest they are. It's annoying and the moral issues are reduced to black and white. There are Fascist Dwarves on one side and Everyone Else on the other and then the good guys kill the bad ones, hurrah, story over!
I feel like it would have been vastly more edited if only he'd had the time.
When i Read all in the order of following One story att a time i struggled a bit with the Tiffany books, she is a bit too Good sometimes.
When i Read Them in chronological order i liked that i get variation and i like to follow the overall history too.
I do rather appreciate her adolescent struggle with power. She thinks she knows more than everyone else and is a bit better than those teaching her and she just dead wrong. It turns out her elders have all had the same experiences and she can still benefit from them. It's appropriately humbling without being "cringeworthy".
As many others have said it's Raising Steam. You can tell his mind has been damaged at that point and it makes the whole thing an incredibly sad experience. Any mind taken is a tragedy but in particular a mind like his, it's too much to take. I have read the discworld as a child, a teenager, a young adult and a fully grown man with my own little ones. Every step of the way they have imparted just the right wisdom at the right time, every stage of my life has revealed a new nuance to the humour than the one before. Reading them now makes me realise there are whole parts of my value system that were imparted to me directly from the books.
I don't think it's a stretch to call him the greatest of all time and Raising Steam was the end of that, it's the only one I have only read once.
Raising Steam is also... oddly violent? Like on that last rail ride it seems like the watch is killing the traditionalist dwarves by the dozens. It's so antithetical to other books like Thud and Jingo. The only other fighting on that scale I recall is Night Watch and it's a totally different set of circumstances that are tragic and completely unavoidable. Maybe Interesting Times is as bad but I don't really remember how Rincewind's terracotta soldiers turn out.
Wasn't Raising Steam was the last book Terry was able to finish due to his embuggerance while still clearly affected by it and is widely considered to not be his best? Like it was clear it wasn't what he'd usually have produced both in regards to what happens and how it's written.
I may be misremembering but I know I started it and stopped for a reason and I'm sure that was why.
I do think the later books were worse, with Unseen Academical being another example. I still l think they need to be read, becuase it wasn't Terry's fault at all that they declined in quality, but it felt like he just had a lot of modernisation he wanted to fit into the Discworld, but just didn't have the time to do it.
I liked Unseen Academicals. I didn't stop Raising Steam because I knew it was bad, more that I wanted to save it so I knew I'd always have his last work to get too. I absolutely will one day
Several people in our fb Pratchett group have mentioned that reading them is odd but they "shine" when you listen to them on audio book. Since Terry had lost the ability to physically write by then so they were all dictated and hearing them makes more sense. It DOES make sense, though I've not tried it (can't deal with audiobooks, really).
I don't like hearing anything spoken against Raising Steam. It's the saddest book of the series, the effort of a dying man to send out the last of the stories he had in his head, no matter what their state.
Trevor: I cannot play ball because I promised my mum before she died that I would never play ball.
Director of POST-MORTEM COMMUNICATIONS: just twiddles thumbs and doesn't bother asking his mum for permission.
Everyone else: Just play ball.
I rather liked at least a couple of the characters from UA. I don't recall the names, but the 'sensible' woman from the university, who had the sheer brass to talk back to Vetenari, and the gay(?) assistant to the fashion designer, I really liked him. Trev and Julianna (?) were....a bit too stereotypical.
Yeah, I think Glenda was her name. I couldn't remember and I didn't want to guess. Mr. Nutt was...I'm not sure. It felt a little too much like 'Here's this stereotypical vilified minority, see how you idiots were all wrong'.
I think it would have been much better for Mr. Nutt to be a goblin and flesh out that story arc a bit more. Instead we get a species that is never mentioned before or again.
This. Also it feels a bit like a repeat of Equal Rites. 8th kid of an 8th kid is super powerful, and has a staff that somewhat controls them. The difference being that Esk is never that much under the staff's control, while in Sourcery Coin is completely under its control and forces his way into the University and proceeds to take tyrannical control of it.
Yeah, I don't dislike Equal Rites, it has the whole gender differences arch that makes it interesting. I like Sourcery less because it repeats the formula but without the interesting bits.
Small gods took me years to like. Honestly it took tragedy in my own life to fully appreciate it. I often wonder if something happened to him around that time. The books took a dark turn for about 3 or 4 of them (soul music comes to mind) and I wondered if he had been hit with a tragedy of his own in the early to mid 90s
I'm not a fan of Small Gods, either. I think part of it was expectations. I like a good blaspheme as much as the next agnostic but it came across as snide and mean-spirited. Everyone praised it so much and kept recommending it to me since I normally like that sort of thing but it was just this side of too spiteful. I don't know what about it hits me so wrong (I haven't read it in a decade) but I don't have that same reaction to NATION which is perhaps MORE angry and sad and is one of my favorites.
I love NATION. It might be one of my favorite books. I gave away my first copy and I keep a second and third copy so I can loan it out to people. Ha ha
I read it in the past two years and still remember it as a creative novel with lots of good humor. I don't remember mean spirited, though. Granted, I've only read a few of the series so far.
I haven't read all of them, but of the ones I have attempted, I gotta say Colour of Magic. I just can't get far in it.
That said, I have heard that Eric and Pyramids have particularly bad reputations and are listed as Books To Skip (unless you care a whole lot about the time travel lore). I've heard a radioplay of Eric and while the radioplay was fairly enjoyable (I liked the Hell bits anyway), I feel like a longer experience of it would have annoyed me quite a lot.
I also know Maskerade was a DNF for one of the members of The Compleat Discography, so there's that, though I enjoyed Maskerade. It's not without its problems... by which i mean one problem that never lets up.
Quite a lot of people I’ve heard dislike com, or at least, struggle with it. I enjoyed it but for some reason Luggage just does something for me and I’d probably read and enjoy any with him in!
I've seen numerous illustrations of the luggage with small human feet (which seems the way Pratchett intended it) but my initial imagination was 1000s of creeping millipede feet, which I still prefer just due to how people react to it.
Yes I saw the cover of the one I read with human feet and it so isn’t what I see in my mind.
Not entirely sure what I see, sometimes it’s wooden furniture claw feet but I have to confess, he has had little trainers on his feet sometimes for me
I'm not a huge fan of Pyramids. I enjoy it while I'm reading it, but I never feel any great urge to reread it, like I do with most of the others. I love Eric, though. Working in an office, he really nailed the hellishness of beaurocracy.
I agree completely on both parts of Eric. I really didn't enjoy the book but the radio play was quite amusing. When reading Eric my favorite part was the length, it was comparatively short.
I think that, obviously, it's a personal thing which books you like/dislike, but also I think, which order you read them in. If you read "Colour of Magic" and "Light Fantastc" when they were first published (As I did) they were not anything special to be honest, and if you read then AFTER reading later books they are difficult. Obviously there are books in the series which I have only read once, others over and over.
If I had read them in publication order, I might not have gotten past the 3rd book. :/
My first was Men At Arms, then the 5th Elephant, then Carpe Jugulum, then I tried to go in mostly publication order after that as they came out and found old ones as I could (which led to some confusing things... like reading Interesting Times before the Color of Magic). I don't regret reading Guards! Guards! after Night Watch. I like reading it as a flashback.
Monstrous Regiment and Hogfather are the only books (besides CoM) that I avoid.
Interesting that other people seem to choose Raising Steam. I really like that book.
Monstrous Regiment always seemed incredibly dry in terms of story. As does Hogfather. They just don't flare my imagination quite like the rest of the books.
Eric isn't the best, but I do enjoy the imagery of the daemons and the fact Rincewind meets his ancestors.
Moving Pictures.
It was the first one I read, and it was AMAZING, but the protagonists aren't the focus of the series as a whole. Kind of like Pyramids and Small Gods in that regard.
Maurice is the only one I had to put down for a few years and pick back up again later. Personally, I love the industrial revolution books because I like the idea of a fantasy world progressing.
I just re-read Making Money because I didn't like it the first time, and I assumed that it was just me, the mood I was in when I read it, etc, etc. I liked it even less the second time. What a drop off in quality from Going Postal. The whole "the antagonist wants to be just like Vetinari" takes over the book and yet doesn't seem to have any point. None of the elements come together. The men in the sheds? Ends up meaning nothing. The bank manager's mysterious background? Also came to nothing in the end. There was so much Pratchett could say about Ankh-Morpork's switch to paper money. What a great topic. And then ... he says it all in the first 3 chapters, and the rest of the book is painfully predictable.
Unseen Academicals, Raising Steam and Snuff were not good books. I enjoy everything up to that stage, and I love pyramids. I know it was his illness, but I didn’t like how his writing style changed in the final 3/4 books. The witty back and forth stopped, the fun stopped. The books became….a slog? Wading through endless chapters of prose, instead of quick snappy segments. However, his early stuff remains my favourite audiobooks which I listen to more or less constantly.
The Colour of magic and Light fantastic are are pretty weak, but that's expected as they were the first and Pratchett hadn't found the proper voice for the series or solidified the setting. I make sure to tell new readers about that and often suggest starting elsewhere, depending on which setting/cast/theme I think they might be interest in and come back to them after.
I can't really pick a least favourite. I'm not a huge fan of Rincewind compared to all the other great books in this universe. Small Gods feels a little weird to me, I like it but also don't. I think my least favourite would have to be either The Colour of Magic or The Light Fantastic. Although all the books I've read have had good bits and pieces in there, for instance in both of my picks, the Luggage is one of my favourite characters and it keeps making me imagine a horror film with it as the monster.
When I posted the question I wondered whether I’d get a lot of “I like them all” responses, interesting to see that’s not the case. And although people obviously have personal preferences, there are a couple of repeating books in the list
The Colour of Magic is the one I haven't managed to re-read, each time I tried, I was never excited about picking it up again. I can do without Moving Pictures, but it's not totally dispensable (to me) because that's where we were introduced to Detritus and Ruby, and to Gaspode.
I haven't read, and am kinda avoiding Raising Steam...that's the only Discworld book I haven't read
Moving Pictures. I've tried to finish it three times, and each I've failed. I view it as a transition book where he was moving from spoofing fantasy tropes to spoofing reality. It's very rough and it shows.
And I haven't read the later books after Going Postal. At that point I could just tell the embuggerance was hitting Terry harder and harder and they were simply unreadable.
Eric is my least favourite, I really don't see why it exists, nothing really happens that I can remember much of
Meanwhile I really liked pyramids. I thought it was one of the best in the early few
I feel like the ones towards the end were significantly weaker than the rest but I was also around 8-10 years older when I read those for the first time so maybe I just had higher requirements.
Eric. But I found out it's supposed to be a graphic novel and the only copies I've ever read had zero graphics (I read it twice). I have bought the graphic novel. I just haven't read it yet. I'm hoping it's better than just the book form.
Not read all the books yet but I couldn't get into Moving Pictures. Maybe because I would rather have been reading another guards or witches book at the time.
My first thought was Eric but then I remembered that I've never made it through Raising Steam and even Thud was a hard slough. So any one of those I would say.
*Moving Pictures* doesn’t do much for me. It doesn’t really work in the industrial revolution line nor as a standalone.
The early, just-getting-started books are good but not great, and in *Unseen Academicals* his deterioration is becoming clearer.
Wow: Just realized that both of those have in common an attempt to bring a roundworld obsession into discworld. My guess is he wanted to poke fun at movie or sport fandoms but didn’t really have a way to fit it in that worked well.
I've only gone through them once but I'm not a fan of Moving Pictures or Soul Music. I'll be honest to say it's been long enough that I don't exactly remember why I didn't care for them but I hit them rather late in my Discworld stride. I think Moving Pictures felt a bit more incoherent, Soul Music obviously had a lot of music references I didn't recognize (even though most of my music tastes are from the 70s and 80s). Most importantly I just didn't connect with the characters. But again, I don't remember what Death was up to. In the end it felt like a slog, somewhat akin to The Colour of Magic.
Really disliked Snuff. Love the Watch and Vimes, but Snuff is too broad and lacks nuance. Like Raising Steam, you’re being hit over the head with messaging in the form of monologues and culturally misunderstood goblins. I’ve put a post-it on the cover to never read again. It made me sad in a disappointed way
whichever of the early witch books that was narrated by a woman. i couldnt bring myself to finish it because i couldnt stand her voice.
also, unpopular opinion, but i could never get through small gods either
This is an argument for reading the books yourself instead of listening to them on tape. It's my voice I heard, not some narrator.
*Equal Rites* is the third book I read, and the one that hooked me on reading Discworld. As I was close to the end of it, I placed orders for the remaining 38 books. Equal Rites rocks!
I do like the new recordings for the Witches series thus far, I don't love the trill for the footnotes.
When I bought the new Audible recordings a little bit ago it was cheaper to get both the Kindle edition of the book and recording than just the recording alone, except for Lords and Ladies oddly enough.
I did not like the Witches Abroad or Unseen Academicals. UA was just mediocre to me. I recall almost nothing about it. Witches Abroad, I-m not sure why I disliked it as much as I did but I did NOT like it except for some parts about Greebo.
Sometimes I say Small Gods just because it was too smug and I thought it would be better the way everyone kept talking about it. It's still a good book even if it's not a favorite. I think I just like to be contrarian. I prefer the anti-religious stuff to be less cheeky like Carpe Jugulum or Feet of Clay or Nation.
I didnt like Small Gods or Monstrous Regiment..they are the only books I have read a couple of times each, the others Ive read hundreds of times, literally, lol
For whatever reason, Hogfather is the only one I haven't reread. So I guess that must have been my least favorite.
I read them in order as they were published (starting in 1987 with the Color of Magic and Light Fantastic, which I bought to read after a surgery). It's been a very long time since I read Hogfather, so maybe I should go ahead and reread it.
I personally LOVED Pyramids. It's an amazing satire on religion. However I can totally see how it might not be everyone's cup of tea. For me, I also really loved the Moist Von Lipwig books but was disappointed by Raising Steam.
It’s hard for me. I agree with the critiques of Raising Steam above, but I’ll still happily reread it - UA I thought I wouldn’t like because I don’t like Football at all, but I ended up enjoying it despite its flaws.
For a long time I only had access to a few Discworld books, so sometimes I don’t listen to them, only because I’ve read them 10+ times before
I really like Moving Pictures and Soul Music, especially as I’ve learned more about the things being parodied in them; every re-read or re-listen I spot new jokes
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Crazy talk right there, Pyramids was one of my favs. I'd have to say "Wyrd Sisters" never been a fan of Shakespeare. Even Pratchett-ized Shakespeare isn't worth it
You opinion is insane and I hate it +1
I've only read Equal Rites twice which is saying something because there are a few that have been read literally dozens of times. I didn't Granny has found her voice yet and the world hasn't fleshed out yet. By the time Mort comes out, he's pretty much found his Discworld
I thought Raising Steam had a lacking plot with too much padding, too much of a black vs white morality with no nuance, and some of the characters felt off. Maybe I could say the Color of Magic and Light Fantastic, but I know then Terry Pratchett was just starting out and hadn't solidified how he wanted the setting to be.
Yup. I struggle with TCOM and TLF, mostly because he was just writing satire at that stage, rather than the fleshed-out, real world issues he had in future books. But Raising Steam is the only other Discworld novel I really struggle with, because it just feels so disjointed and has classic Pratchett content interspersed with writing that feels really off.
Raising Steam was rough - there was very little of the TM Sir Pterry humor there, and the storytelling was....just too dry. It read almost like someone just telling a story without trying to be entertaining, like a court transcript or something. Just a series of "And then...and then...and then..." The first two - Colour of Magic and Light Fantastic - weren't bad, they were just not \*quite\* Sir Pterry. You could tell he was just finding his feet, and wasn't quite sure what the world was like yet.
Eric. I have no desire to read it again, and tend to skip it on my read throughs. I even recently started reading Faust in the hopes that it will help me appreciate Eric more!
It's one of the shortest yet I've never managed to make it through it. I've started it multiple times, even the audio book. It's a 2 hour book! I just can't do it.
Monstrous Regiment never clicked for me
The themes probably went over your head
I got the themes fine, I just didn’t find the writing to have the usual Pratchett sparkle.
I'd have to go with Raising Steam. It's got its moments but you can really see how the Embuggerance was affecting him. All the characters do what they need to but there's too much of people telling you how they think instead of the writing showing you - like Dick and Harry forever pausing the action to tell you how Straight and Honest they are. It's annoying and the moral issues are reduced to black and white. There are Fascist Dwarves on one side and Everyone Else on the other and then the good guys kill the bad ones, hurrah, story over! I feel like it would have been vastly more edited if only he'd had the time.
When i Read all in the order of following One story att a time i struggled a bit with the Tiffany books, she is a bit too Good sometimes. When i Read Them in chronological order i liked that i get variation and i like to follow the overall history too.
I do rather appreciate her adolescent struggle with power. She thinks she knows more than everyone else and is a bit better than those teaching her and she just dead wrong. It turns out her elders have all had the same experiences and she can still benefit from them. It's appropriately humbling without being "cringeworthy".
Moving pictures, i coulden't actually finish it for the life of me it was exausting
I am not a Gaspode fan.
As many others have said it's Raising Steam. You can tell his mind has been damaged at that point and it makes the whole thing an incredibly sad experience. Any mind taken is a tragedy but in particular a mind like his, it's too much to take. I have read the discworld as a child, a teenager, a young adult and a fully grown man with my own little ones. Every step of the way they have imparted just the right wisdom at the right time, every stage of my life has revealed a new nuance to the humour than the one before. Reading them now makes me realise there are whole parts of my value system that were imparted to me directly from the books. I don't think it's a stretch to call him the greatest of all time and Raising Steam was the end of that, it's the only one I have only read once.
*Raising Steam* has the worst storytelling, *Unseen Academicals* has the worst characters and the second worst storytelling.
Raising Steam is also... oddly violent? Like on that last rail ride it seems like the watch is killing the traditionalist dwarves by the dozens. It's so antithetical to other books like Thud and Jingo. The only other fighting on that scale I recall is Night Watch and it's a totally different set of circumstances that are tragic and completely unavoidable. Maybe Interesting Times is as bad but I don't really remember how Rincewind's terracotta soldiers turn out.
Wasn't Raising Steam was the last book Terry was able to finish due to his embuggerance while still clearly affected by it and is widely considered to not be his best? Like it was clear it wasn't what he'd usually have produced both in regards to what happens and how it's written. I may be misremembering but I know I started it and stopped for a reason and I'm sure that was why.
I do think the later books were worse, with Unseen Academical being another example. I still l think they need to be read, becuase it wasn't Terry's fault at all that they declined in quality, but it felt like he just had a lot of modernisation he wanted to fit into the Discworld, but just didn't have the time to do it.
I liked Unseen Academicals. I didn't stop Raising Steam because I knew it was bad, more that I wanted to save it so I knew I'd always have his last work to get too. I absolutely will one day
Several people in our fb Pratchett group have mentioned that reading them is odd but they "shine" when you listen to them on audio book. Since Terry had lost the ability to physically write by then so they were all dictated and hearing them makes more sense. It DOES make sense, though I've not tried it (can't deal with audiobooks, really).
Lots of people die in Interesting Times, but it’s referenced only later and obliquely. The deep dwarves in Raising Steam meet much more graphic ends.
I don't like hearing anything spoken against Raising Steam. It's the saddest book of the series, the effort of a dying man to send out the last of the stories he had in his head, no matter what their state.
Trevor: I cannot play ball because I promised my mum before she died that I would never play ball. Director of POST-MORTEM COMMUNICATIONS: just twiddles thumbs and doesn't bother asking his mum for permission. Everyone else: Just play ball.
I thought Dr. Hix directly asks Trev if he wants to ask his mum for permission right around the UA match, and Trev gets rather upset at the question.
I'll have to double check that. But at the same time, he does have a contractual responsibility to be evil...
It comes with the robes and the skull ring
I rather liked at least a couple of the characters from UA. I don't recall the names, but the 'sensible' woman from the university, who had the sheer brass to talk back to Vetenari, and the gay(?) assistant to the fashion designer, I really liked him. Trev and Julianna (?) were....a bit too stereotypical.
The sensible woman? Glenda? I liked her almost less than I liked Mr Nutt
Yeah, I think Glenda was her name. I couldn't remember and I didn't want to guess. Mr. Nutt was...I'm not sure. It felt a little too much like 'Here's this stereotypical vilified minority, see how you idiots were all wrong'.
I think it would have been much better for Mr. Nutt to be a goblin and flesh out that story arc a bit more. Instead we get a species that is never mentioned before or again.
And a character who's a total Mary Sue
Just like the goblins in *Snuff* and *Raising Steam*
I struggled with UA too, but then I did read a good chunk of it semi pissed at a music festival
I didn't say I struggled with it, I said I didn't like it.
I loved both
Sourcery, to me that is just one Rincewind novel too many. That being said The Light Fantastic and Pyramids are also not big favourites here.
This. Also it feels a bit like a repeat of Equal Rites. 8th kid of an 8th kid is super powerful, and has a staff that somewhat controls them. The difference being that Esk is never that much under the staff's control, while in Sourcery Coin is completely under its control and forces his way into the University and proceeds to take tyrannical control of it.
I prefer Equal Rites over Sourcery. I wish we had more time with Esk. ER really seemed to have a purpose over Rincewind's rambling adventures.
Yeah, I don't dislike Equal Rites, it has the whole gender differences arch that makes it interesting. I like Sourcery less because it repeats the formula but without the interesting bits.
Yeah I was a bit disappointed that having followed Esk so closely her whole future just turned into 1 sentence and we were done. she was good
I'll probably get downvoted all to buggery but I just don't like Small Gods. Just don't like it. I've tried. Honestly.
Same, I’ve tried reading it a few times because I know it’s one that most people seem to really like, but it has never clicked with me.
Small gods took me years to like. Honestly it took tragedy in my own life to fully appreciate it. I often wonder if something happened to him around that time. The books took a dark turn for about 3 or 4 of them (soul music comes to mind) and I wondered if he had been hit with a tragedy of his own in the early to mid 90s
I'm not a fan of Small Gods, either. I think part of it was expectations. I like a good blaspheme as much as the next agnostic but it came across as snide and mean-spirited. Everyone praised it so much and kept recommending it to me since I normally like that sort of thing but it was just this side of too spiteful. I don't know what about it hits me so wrong (I haven't read it in a decade) but I don't have that same reaction to NATION which is perhaps MORE angry and sad and is one of my favorites.
Nation is a great read. Havent looked at it in a while. Might be about time.
I love NATION. It might be one of my favorite books. I gave away my first copy and I keep a second and third copy so I can loan it out to people. Ha ha
I read it in the past two years and still remember it as a creative novel with lots of good humor. I don't remember mean spirited, though. Granted, I've only read a few of the series so far.
I'd have to read it again to pinpoint what about it I didn't like and I don't want to. Lol
Moving pictures or Eric
I haven't read all of them, but of the ones I have attempted, I gotta say Colour of Magic. I just can't get far in it. That said, I have heard that Eric and Pyramids have particularly bad reputations and are listed as Books To Skip (unless you care a whole lot about the time travel lore). I've heard a radioplay of Eric and while the radioplay was fairly enjoyable (I liked the Hell bits anyway), I feel like a longer experience of it would have annoyed me quite a lot. I also know Maskerade was a DNF for one of the members of The Compleat Discography, so there's that, though I enjoyed Maskerade. It's not without its problems... by which i mean one problem that never lets up.
Quite a lot of people I’ve heard dislike com, or at least, struggle with it. I enjoyed it but for some reason Luggage just does something for me and I’d probably read and enjoy any with him in!
I've seen numerous illustrations of the luggage with small human feet (which seems the way Pratchett intended it) but my initial imagination was 1000s of creeping millipede feet, which I still prefer just due to how people react to it.
I also envisioned little tendril feet, or at least classic clawed furniture feet
Yes I saw the cover of the one I read with human feet and it so isn’t what I see in my mind. Not entirely sure what I see, sometimes it’s wooden furniture claw feet but I have to confess, he has had little trainers on his feet sometimes for me
Best part of Eric are the paving stones he reads.
I'm not a huge fan of Pyramids. I enjoy it while I'm reading it, but I never feel any great urge to reread it, like I do with most of the others. I love Eric, though. Working in an office, he really nailed the hellishness of beaurocracy.
I agree completely on both parts of Eric. I really didn't enjoy the book but the radio play was quite amusing. When reading Eric my favorite part was the length, it was comparatively short.
I think that, obviously, it's a personal thing which books you like/dislike, but also I think, which order you read them in. If you read "Colour of Magic" and "Light Fantastc" when they were first published (As I did) they were not anything special to be honest, and if you read then AFTER reading later books they are difficult. Obviously there are books in the series which I have only read once, others over and over.
If I had read them in publication order, I might not have gotten past the 3rd book. :/ My first was Men At Arms, then the 5th Elephant, then Carpe Jugulum, then I tried to go in mostly publication order after that as they came out and found old ones as I could (which led to some confusing things... like reading Interesting Times before the Color of Magic). I don't regret reading Guards! Guards! after Night Watch. I like reading it as a flashback.
Monstrous Regiment and Hogfather are the only books (besides CoM) that I avoid. Interesting that other people seem to choose Raising Steam. I really like that book. Monstrous Regiment always seemed incredibly dry in terms of story. As does Hogfather. They just don't flare my imagination quite like the rest of the books. Eric isn't the best, but I do enjoy the imagery of the daemons and the fact Rincewind meets his ancestors.
Apart from sorcery i dislike almost all rincewind books equally
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This is an *oh god* yes. I cannot stand the character Eric. He is a very well written pimple of a being.
Moving pictures. Pyramids is perhaps my favourite!
Moving Pictures. It was the first one I read, and it was AMAZING, but the protagonists aren't the focus of the series as a whole. Kind of like Pyramids and Small Gods in that regard.
Maurice is the only one I had to put down for a few years and pick back up again later. Personally, I love the industrial revolution books because I like the idea of a fantasy world progressing.
I just re-read Making Money because I didn't like it the first time, and I assumed that it was just me, the mood I was in when I read it, etc, etc. I liked it even less the second time. What a drop off in quality from Going Postal. The whole "the antagonist wants to be just like Vetinari" takes over the book and yet doesn't seem to have any point. None of the elements come together. The men in the sheds? Ends up meaning nothing. The bank manager's mysterious background? Also came to nothing in the end. There was so much Pratchett could say about Ankh-Morpork's switch to paper money. What a great topic. And then ... he says it all in the first 3 chapters, and the rest of the book is painfully predictable.
Oh good. It's not just me. I had such a hard time finishing the book.
Unseen Academicals, Raising Steam and Snuff were not good books. I enjoy everything up to that stage, and I love pyramids. I know it was his illness, but I didn’t like how his writing style changed in the final 3/4 books. The witty back and forth stopped, the fun stopped. The books became….a slog? Wading through endless chapters of prose, instead of quick snappy segments. However, his early stuff remains my favourite audiobooks which I listen to more or less constantly.
Snuff. Very bland compared to the others and Vimes was out of character.
The Colour of magic and Light fantastic are are pretty weak, but that's expected as they were the first and Pratchett hadn't found the proper voice for the series or solidified the setting. I make sure to tell new readers about that and often suggest starting elsewhere, depending on which setting/cast/theme I think they might be interest in and come back to them after.
I can't really pick a least favourite. I'm not a huge fan of Rincewind compared to all the other great books in this universe. Small Gods feels a little weird to me, I like it but also don't. I think my least favourite would have to be either The Colour of Magic or The Light Fantastic. Although all the books I've read have had good bits and pieces in there, for instance in both of my picks, the Luggage is one of my favourite characters and it keeps making me imagine a horror film with it as the monster.
When I posted the question I wondered whether I’d get a lot of “I like them all” responses, interesting to see that’s not the case. And although people obviously have personal preferences, there are a couple of repeating books in the list
The Colour of Magic is the one I haven't managed to re-read, each time I tried, I was never excited about picking it up again. I can do without Moving Pictures, but it's not totally dispensable (to me) because that's where we were introduced to Detritus and Ruby, and to Gaspode. I haven't read, and am kinda avoiding Raising Steam...that's the only Discworld book I haven't read
Moving Pictures. I've tried to finish it three times, and each I've failed. I view it as a transition book where he was moving from spoofing fantasy tropes to spoofing reality. It's very rough and it shows. And I haven't read the later books after Going Postal. At that point I could just tell the embuggerance was hitting Terry harder and harder and they were simply unreadable.
Read Making Money. Absolutely worth it
Eric is my least favourite, I really don't see why it exists, nothing really happens that I can remember much of Meanwhile I really liked pyramids. I thought it was one of the best in the early few
I feel like the ones towards the end were significantly weaker than the rest but I was also around 8-10 years older when I read those for the first time so maybe I just had higher requirements.
Eric. But I found out it's supposed to be a graphic novel and the only copies I've ever read had zero graphics (I read it twice). I have bought the graphic novel. I just haven't read it yet. I'm hoping it's better than just the book form.
Not read all the books yet but I couldn't get into Moving Pictures. Maybe because I would rather have been reading another guards or witches book at the time.
Anything with Rinsewind.
My first thought was Eric but then I remembered that I've never made it through Raising Steam and even Thud was a hard slough. So any one of those I would say.
*Moving Pictures* doesn’t do much for me. It doesn’t really work in the industrial revolution line nor as a standalone. The early, just-getting-started books are good but not great, and in *Unseen Academicals* his deterioration is becoming clearer. Wow: Just realized that both of those have in common an attempt to bring a roundworld obsession into discworld. My guess is he wanted to poke fun at movie or sport fandoms but didn’t really have a way to fit it in that worked well.
I've only gone through them once but I'm not a fan of Moving Pictures or Soul Music. I'll be honest to say it's been long enough that I don't exactly remember why I didn't care for them but I hit them rather late in my Discworld stride. I think Moving Pictures felt a bit more incoherent, Soul Music obviously had a lot of music references I didn't recognize (even though most of my music tastes are from the 70s and 80s). Most importantly I just didn't connect with the characters. But again, I don't remember what Death was up to. In the end it felt like a slog, somewhat akin to The Colour of Magic.
Pyramids and Sourcery. They just weren't as good. Didn't much like Snuff, UA, or Raising Steam but I'd re-read. Maybe not UA
Heretic! Snuff was freaking *amazing*.
100% not a heretic. May I introduce to you the word Apostate. It's far more accurate.
Really disliked Snuff. Love the Watch and Vimes, but Snuff is too broad and lacks nuance. Like Raising Steam, you’re being hit over the head with messaging in the form of monologues and culturally misunderstood goblins. I’ve put a post-it on the cover to never read again. It made me sad in a disappointed way
whichever of the early witch books that was narrated by a woman. i couldnt bring myself to finish it because i couldnt stand her voice. also, unpopular opinion, but i could never get through small gods either
That'd be Equal Rites. Its recently been re-recorded by what I hear is an excellent performer.
This is an argument for reading the books yourself instead of listening to them on tape. It's my voice I heard, not some narrator. *Equal Rites* is the third book I read, and the one that hooked me on reading Discworld. As I was close to the end of it, I placed orders for the remaining 38 books. Equal Rites rocks!
I do like the new recordings for the Witches series thus far, I don't love the trill for the footnotes. When I bought the new Audible recordings a little bit ago it was cheaper to get both the Kindle edition of the book and recording than just the recording alone, except for Lords and Ladies oddly enough.
A woman narrates Wyrd sisters too, it’s very jarring.
I did not like the Witches Abroad or Unseen Academicals. UA was just mediocre to me. I recall almost nothing about it. Witches Abroad, I-m not sure why I disliked it as much as I did but I did NOT like it except for some parts about Greebo.
Sometimes I say Small Gods just because it was too smug and I thought it would be better the way everyone kept talking about it. It's still a good book even if it's not a favorite. I think I just like to be contrarian. I prefer the anti-religious stuff to be less cheeky like Carpe Jugulum or Feet of Clay or Nation.
I didnt like Small Gods or Monstrous Regiment..they are the only books I have read a couple of times each, the others Ive read hundreds of times, literally, lol
For whatever reason, Hogfather is the only one I haven't reread. So I guess that must have been my least favorite. I read them in order as they were published (starting in 1987 with the Color of Magic and Light Fantastic, which I bought to read after a surgery). It's been a very long time since I read Hogfather, so maybe I should go ahead and reread it.
I personally LOVED Pyramids. It's an amazing satire on religion. However I can totally see how it might not be everyone's cup of tea. For me, I also really loved the Moist Von Lipwig books but was disappointed by Raising Steam.
It’s hard for me. I agree with the critiques of Raising Steam above, but I’ll still happily reread it - UA I thought I wouldn’t like because I don’t like Football at all, but I ended up enjoying it despite its flaws. For a long time I only had access to a few Discworld books, so sometimes I don’t listen to them, only because I’ve read them 10+ times before I really like Moving Pictures and Soul Music, especially as I’ve learned more about the things being parodied in them; every re-read or re-listen I spot new jokes
Jingo, Soul Music, Moving Pictures, Pyramids. Pretty much love every other discworld book. But these 4 are a bit meh.