Discworld for Beginners?

[DKT]

Hey all - pretty sure there are some pretty big Discworld fans on this forum

I've only read a couple of them myself, but would like to read/listen to some more. Any suggestions on where to start? (I've read Mort and Hogfather. Um, also Where's My Cow? but I don't think that counts  ) I'd like to check out some of the City Watch books like Night Watch or Guards! Guards! I also hear hear Reaper Man is good.

So...any advice?

[Scattercat]

"Reaper Man" is a good standalone.  I'm also fond of "Small Gods," which is just a one-shot.  No other books stem off of it, in other words.

There are "series" of books within the Discworld that happen chronologically to the same characters, but not like actual series; if you read the books in the order of publication, you'll jump from character set to character set but you won't miss any significant events in anyone's stories.  Otherwise, the major threads are:

Death and Susan:

Mort
Reaper Man
Soul Music
Hogfather
Thief of Time

The Witches of Lancre:

Equal Rites (sort of)
Wyrd Sisters
Witches Abroad
Lords and Ladies
Maskerade
Carpe Jugulum

(These sort of fade into the Tiffany Aching books, which are also awesome.)

The Wee Free Men
A Hat Full of Sky
Wintersmith
I Shall Wear Midnight


The Night Watch series:

Guards!  Guards!
Men at Arms
Feet of Clay
Jingo
The Fifth Elephant
Night Watch
Monstrous Regiment (sort of)
Thud!

The Rincewind books, which kicked off the series:

The Colour of Magic
The Light Fantastic
Sourcery
Faust Eric
Interesting Times
The Last Continent

Everything else is mostly a one-shot.  Pyramids, Moving Pictures, and so on.  They involve the same characters and many of the same set pieces, and sometimes you'll see a reference to other events (which can be confusing if you don't read in straight chronological order but never impacts the story overmuch.)  For instance, Death appears in virtually every novel in at least a cameo, and the Patrician generally gets involved whenever Ankh-Morpork is a major setting, but this is more a factor of the persistent world effect than a real chronology issue.

Wikipedia has a handy list of all the novels in the order they were written, if that helps.

[iamafish]

the first Terry Pratchett novel I read was The Wee Free Men, which was great fun. I plan to read more, but the Wee Free Men was a pretty good introduction to the world.

[Boggled Coriander]

My first Discworld was "Jingo", which probably isn't the best choice for newcomers, as it centers on a group of recurring characters whom you're assumed to already be familiar with.  My second was "Monstrous Regiment", which may be as good a choice as any of the later books, as it introduces a new group of protagonists.  It's also got some returning characters from previous installments, but they're kept somewhat in the background.

Take the above with a grain of salt, as to date they're the only Discworld books I've read.  I've got "The Color of Magic" on my bookshelf, though, and hope to get to reading it soon.

[Heradel]

*Glances at The Pratchett Shelf, looks back at Macbook*

There's actually a very nice chart for this. I'd mostly agree with it, though I don't think it's particularly necessary to start at the first novels in each particular series (for example, I've still never read the first three Rincewind books).

My first was The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, which is a perfect book for middle-school aged kids. After that I honestly can't remember which ones I was reading next, but it was nearly all of them, and fairly rapidly. And I really feel like I'm repeating myself here, so I'll just go and pull some of the text from my Unseen Academicals review.

I first came to Discworld around twelve or thirteen when a librarian thrust The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents into my hands soon after it was published.
A world in which that librarian didn’t test the book out on me not worth thinking about.  It wasn’t the first bit of fantasy I’d read, but it certainly pulled me away from the Star Trek and Star Wars pulp I’d been reading up till then, and I don’t think I laughed that hard again until I watched Fawlty Towers. Thereafter the publishing of a new Discworld book was for me kind of like the publishing of a new Harry Potter book was for the rest of my generation (though alright, I pulled all nighters reading those too). I’ve read through the City Watch cycle at least once a year since I was fourteen, and have only a precious few Discworlds left yet to read.

This may actually be the first year I don't get back through all or nearly all of the City Watch cycle, mainly because I've started working and because the raw and filtered slush piles take up a fair bit of the time I'd be spending reading other things.

[Scattercat]

Yeah, Maurice is good times.

Personally, I get a little tired of how Mary Sue-ish Captain Vimes ends up by the end of the books.  He starts out reasonably, but by the end of the sequence it's pretty clear that he's the favorite child out of the Discworld protagonists.

[Listener]

I started with "Moving Pictures", before I knew Discworld was a series. You don't have to know anything about any characters because they're all introduced for you -- Ridcully and the Bursar (it's Ridcully's first book), Throat Dibbler, the various guilds...

"Men at Arms" is a decent place to start as well. I read it before "Guards Guards".

[Heradel]

I started with "Moving Pictures", before I knew Discworld was a series. You don't have to know anything about any characters because they're all introduced for you -- Ridcully and the Bursar (it's Ridcully's first book), Throat Dibbler, the various guilds...

"Men at Arms" is a decent place to start as well. I read it before "Guards Guards".

Moving Pictures is probably a fairly decent place to start. Pratchett is usually fairly new user-friendly in terms of the series -- while there are clearly books that lead into each other, each single book tends to be pretty good divorced from the rest of mythos, and for the most part you're not punished for reading out of order (it may be best to read the Monks of Time books in something close to the correct order). Honestly, the feel of Discworld as a whole is kind of like Star Trek:TOS -- a recognizable cast of characters, but not a lot of overarching plot.

[Scattercat]

The development of the themes is fascinating to me, and that definitely can be seen a lot more clearly if the books are read in order...

[Heradel]

The development of the themes is fascinating to me, and that definitely can be seen a lot more clearly if the books are read in order...

Well, yes, but at that point you may be onto your second read-through of some of the cycles.

I don't know, I didn't come to most of the books as an adult, so it's hard for me to judge how an adult would see the series develop. Obviously Death and Vimes have the greatest character arcs, but since Death's the only one that's in every book he gets the main character gold star. Also I wrote several thousand words on this Death in my undergrad thesis, so I'm partial.

The strongest theme books for me have always been the industrial revolution ones, especially the latter half. The Guards ones have the fairly bog standard British duty themes plus governance, but I think the thematic are always secondary there to telling good cops and robbers tales, and the endless wait for Angua and Carrot to get together already.

[Scattercat]

The progressing attitude towards the gods and religion is also interesting, and the increasingly finely-grained perception of the non-British bits of the Discworld (admittedly a relatively small percentage.)

I notice this stuff as a matter of course, and have done even when I was young, but rereading definitely lets me have a stronger perspective on the matters as a whole.

Man, now I need to go reread all the Discworld books...

[stePH]

the first Terry Pratchett novel I read was The Wee Free Men, which was great fun. I plan to read more, but the Wee Free Men was a pretty good introduction to the world.

I believe The Wee Free Men is the first (maybe only?) book in which Death does not put in an appearance.

[tinygaia]

I started reading Discworld in '98 and read them all in order of release because I didn't have the internet back then to tell me not to. Because of this, I'm somewhat partial to the idea of reading them in that order but when I've tried to get people hooked on the series, this approach often backfires. Friends tell me they were turned off by the overabundance of slapstick in the early books. If you like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the humor is similar, so it couldn't hurt to start from the beginning.

Otherwise, Reaper Man is my all time favorite and I heartily recommend it as a place to start. For the Night Watch stuff, definitely read them in the order Scattercat suggested.

One thing I've enjoyed about reading them in order is watching the way technology on the Disc advances. The clacks, the c-mail, the post - it's fun to watch these things mentioned off the cuff in one book become widely used later on.

[Umbrageofsnow]

Honestly, I'd skip Equal Rites or any of the other really early books for initially getting into the series. 

Pyramids/Small Gods/ Moving Pictures era stand-alones are an excellent start, as are any of the later ones.

The Guards series shows the most obvious progression, at least that was my entry point, and I really liked it.

[DeptypeToitte]

"Wintersmith" was the first Tiffany Aching book that I read And after reading the others I consider it the best of the trio so far.  I know not everyone likes the whole "young audit" angle but I find the Tiffany Aching linking to the old Witches series a really great new look into the Discworld witches, as well continuing the ongoing theme of "modernizing" that a lot of the books have been following.

[Max e^{i pi}]

The first Discworld novel I read was The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents and I didn't even know it was a Discworld novel.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, then went to my local library and starting checking out Discworld novels at random. It was a lot of fun making retroactive connections and suddenly getting jokes from books I'd finished already.
Then I went back and read them all again, in order.
So yeah, it doesn't really matter what order you read them in, just as long as you read them ;P