Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is fuckin amazing.
Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett are responsible for 80% of my sense of humor.
Never found Douglas Adams books funny but loved how entertaining they are. And discword is one of my favourite series, Pratchett’s writing style makes the books effortless to read.
I really love Douglas Adams books and just going through the middle of the colour of magic… Not feeling like the best book ever, but enjoying It so far. Any recommendations for the next one from Terry Pratchett’s discworld saga? Too many to choose from… 😔
Edit: didn’t expect so many replies, thank you all!!
There’s a reading order guide. Take your pick! I agree that The Color of Magic is one of the worse starting points. I liked the Watch novels (starting with Guards! Guards!).
You people are insane, I tried the ebook for the first one from my library: 7 copies, 37 people waiting
It’s a great book. It’s just got some fantastic competition.
Lol I tried starting with colour of magic and hated it.
So which series do you start on? Rincewind, Witches, Death, or Watch? Does it matter?
Whichever you want. It doesn’t really matter.
Pick whichever of the orange “starter novels” you want (maybe read series synopsis and pick whichever appeals to you most) and proceed down the flowchart. Once you finish one line, go to another.
Where you start is largely a matter of preference, it’s true, but beginning at the start of a subseries makes sense.
Rincewind is a great protagonist. He stars in The Colour of Magic, but several other books also have him. The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic are a pair, the first two books and one story told in two parts. They’re fun but a bit slight. They do introduce Rincewind, Twoflower, The Luggage, Lord Vetinari, The Librarian, Ankh Morpork, Unseen University and a few other things.
The Witches have been my least favorite Discworld books, but I’m much in the minority there. They do have some great characters.
The Death books are uniformly great. Although Death is a main character in all of them, I think it’s only Reaper Man in which he’s the main character. Other characters are Mort, Ysabelle, Albert and later Susan.
The Watch books center around the watchpeople, but especially Capt Vimes. Other characters include Carrot, Angua, Cotton, Nobby, CMOT Dibbler, Gaspode, Detritus, and Vetinari also usually plays a role.
Many, but not all, of the Discworld novels are focused around the biggest city on the Discworld, Ankh Morpork. The Wizards, Watch and Industrial Revolution series are mostly set there. The Witches novels are mostly set in the country of Lancre, and so are a bit more rural. A few books are what you might call one-offs, set in a place that’s never returned to, and that makes them good stand-alone books. I think maybe Small Gods is the best of these.
I would recommend going through at least the first few in order because of world building. My favorite book is Night Watch though.
Colour of magic and light fantastic are 2 of the worst books in the discworld series. They’re not bad books, but nothing compared to what comes later. I read the series in chronological order and don’t regret it, so don’t give up on it. You can also follow the story arcs, if one particularly appeals to you.
Witches is a significant step up, and it only gets better from there, as Pratchett hits his stride.
I disagree, they set the scene for what’s to come.
We see ankh morpork and the wider discworld through the eyes of rincewind (lives it, knows it, mostly hates and/or scared of it) and twoflower (all new, loves it all, naive).
So it sets the stage for all the other characters to enter and exit from there onwards.
Don’t get me wrong, they are important books, and quite good. They just lack something compared to the later books. It’s like the shutter start effect on some films. Initially it’s a bunch of stills. At a critical point it becomes a stuttering moving image. It finally becomes a living breathing film.
You can go with the chronological order of publication or by series. So far I like the Death and the Guards series the best.
Read all the night’s watch books. They are hilarious. Mort is good as a stand alone and the witches books are brilliant too.
I just wanted to recommend Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley Its a very similar style of humor and was actually written before Hitch Hikers. The audiobook is particularly exceptional.
Never heard of it, let me save it for later!
I’ve never read any Pratchett. Any suggsstions on what would be a good startingpoint (as a particularly good example of his writing)?
E: It seems this question was mostly answered in other comments.
There are whole website that are dedicated to advising the reading order of his books. But if you want something from his main book series I suggest Guards Guards, read all the books in that series and then read Making Money, read all the books in that series and then you’ll want to start on anything with the Wizards, possibly not Sorcery despite that being the first one because it’s kind of an early book and sort of weak, and not funny like the later books in the series.
But this guide should help you. Pick something start on the left and go to the right.
Why is there a key in the top left of types of stories designated with shapes. And not a single point in the infographic matches any of those symbols. Which are starter novels? And which are YA?
The key is the colors not the shapes as far as I can tell, as the starter books are all that orange/yellow color
So the YA novels appear to just be the Tiffany Aching series.
The red ones are also labeled “Science Novels,” both in the legend, and as the title of the series attached to the arrow pointing at the first of the series, which isn’t orange, so I guess that the order isn’t as important with those books?
I didn’t make the graphic so I’m not sure on the shapes, but the starter books are the ones on the left with the arrows.
Cheers! Saving the image for later.
I’m not much of a reader but thoroughly enjoyed these books.
Probably the best opening to any non Pratchett book.
I personally really like Mark Lawrence’s red sister opening slightly more for its world building and absurdity until you find out why nuns and the MC particularly are so dangerous in that world
Seveneves starts with the moon shattering.
And Seveneves is a really good book!
But to me at least there’s something incredible and perfect about Douglas Adams jokingly summing up all that ever was, is and will be in two sentences that while almost nonsense also completely capture the situation.
”The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Perhaps my favorite quote of all time is, “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” So simple, effective, and utterly hilarious.
Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.
I turn 42 in a few weeks and decided to finally read HGttG because I thought it was a shame that I hadn’t yet done so, being a fan of both scifi and absurdism. I didn’t grok it. People seem to really love this novel, and I kept waiting to have an ah-ha! moment where I understood what the appeal was, but it never happened. I’m sort of bummed about it. :/
English humor has a certain style to it that doesn’t click for everyone. And some books one just can’t connect with - I have tried reading the Wizard of Earthsea books several times, but it always feels like I’m blind in them.
I’ve found with Pratchett that I had to do the Tiffany Aching books first to really feel his writing; then I was able to read his other stories.
But sometimes it’s exposure; it takes me about a quarter of a book to ‘get’ Shakespeare, then my brain clicks with it and I can read all his plays without trouble.
I feel your pain. At least you tried.
My ah-ha moment was probably: “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
In any case, happy birthday. I hope you find all the answers this year.
See that was my favorite line in the book, and almost everything else wasn’t!
Haha, thanks - here’s hoping!
I remember spending way too long figuring out the very first puzzle in the old text based adventure game that had me stuck in the dark. All you have to do is open your fucking eyes.
I never figured out how to manage to grab the electronic thumb that Ford was carrying to get off the planet.
I did find out that “Fuck” was programmed in as a command. I got frustrated and typed “Fuck Ford.” The game spat back “This is a family entertainment game, not a video nasty.”
Sounds like you should have been playing Leather Goddesses of Phobos
You sit at the bar and get drunk. You also eat some peanuts. I think Ford pushes the button or he gives it to you to hold while he goes to the loo.
I could get drunk and eat the peanuts, but the wind was preventing me from getting to Ford every time the ship showed up
I just finished a book called “The prophet and the idiot” that gave me similar vibes as Douglas Adams. Not the same but very entertaining
My replacement copy of the increasingly inaccurate trilogy, Ultimate,6 story copy just made it this weekend!
HHGTTG, Restaurant at The End of The Universe, Mostly Harmless, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, Young Zaphod plays it Safe. What’s the 6th?
My edition only has those 5, I think.
Mostly Harmless is the fifth book and Young Zaphod followed it, I thought.
You’re correct I forgot about Life The Universe, and Everything.
Life, the Universe and Everything
I’d be content with the ‘never left the trees’ part of that page.
One of my favorites is the Total Perspective Vortex. Every thing in the universe affects every other thing. Therefore you can see everything that is going on by examining a slice of fairy cake.
I feel sorry for Douglas, his work has gone the way of monty python and become over used cringe.
It was a fun read as a kid but too many adults base their whole personality on it and it makes me hurt.
Let people enjoy things
