This evening, I saw a play called Mort, which was adapted from the eponymous Terry Pratchett book. I have (obviously) heard of Discworld, but I have never actually read any of it. Nevertheless, the idea of a play based on stuff like that sounded appealing [and, interestingly, Tolkien's (great? great great?) granddaughter, an Oxford freshman, was in the play so there are other fantasy connections as well] and I was not disappointed. (It turns out that one of my perturbation methods students from last term was also in the play.)
I hadn't know about the play until I read a review of it in one of Oxford's student newspapers, and I was thankfully able to make it today (the last day). The author of the review seemed to find it mediocre, but I was intrigued by both the theme and his/her comments that the character of Death had a very dry sense of humor. That was more than enough to make me want to see it because I like that sort of thing. Sure enough, Death was awesome!
One thing this makes me want to do is read the book, but in looking at Mort's wikipedia entry, there appear to be three books that come before it. My question to the audience is first whether this is necessary for this particular book and second (independent of the answer to the first query) what you think of those three preceding books (as well as this one).
All of the books about Death are great. You can probably read Mort without reading them, but since I read them first, I can't tell if it would be less interesting or not.
ReplyDeleteI read Pratchett completely out of order. These days I recommend starting with the newest books and working backwards--to my mind, the newest ones are better writing, and less of the generic fantasy with bad puns that the series started with. I've read some of the later ones multiple times, but never wanted to return to the earliest ones.
ReplyDelete_Going Postal_ is a particular favorite.
If they are from the same world, I'd rather read the books in some order. (I guess some sets of them may be less sequential than others, but modulo that I get a lot of enjoyment out of references to 'old tails' or whatnot that I happen to have read before and I wouldn't want to complete spoil that right at the outset.) If there are ones I plan to not bother reading, then that's different. I'll come up with some sort of plan eventually. :)
ReplyDeleteYou should read them all. Probably best to buy them in the US, since my UK editions have hideous cover art. There's a web page somewhere diagramming which Discworld books have anything to do with each other (i.e. the Death novels, the Watch novels, the Three Witches novels, the Rincewind novels, etc.). Quite a few Discworld books are stand-alone, also.
ReplyDeleteAh, there it is.
http://www.lspace.org/books/reading-order-guides/index.html
Pick the format you like.
This says start Death with Mort; it's been far too long for me to remember if that's right, but the rest of the guide looks correct to me. Except Pyramids and Small Gods have nothing to do with each other, and most of the "Industrial Revolution" sequence are also stand-alone.
Cool. Thanks. This is very useful!
ReplyDeleteI likely will buy them in the US, especially given that I already have a long backlog of novels and can easily wait. Though I do have to also consider the luggage space issue. (On the way back to the UK in January, I had to convince someone at the airport not to charge me even though I went over by several pounds.)