Small Gods is the most common start-point I see for Discworld. It’s standalone and is far enough into the series that it’s fully found its voice.
But I did read them in order against advice because I can’t fathom doing otherwise.
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This is the link to the FanFiction page of Embers from TVTropes:
Embers Chapter 1, an avatar: last airbender fanfic | FanFiction
I personally downloaded it from Archive Of Our Own, but that site requires a slightly more involved process to join. (Requesting an invitation and providing an e-mail adress, then waiting about three weeks until you get a reply allowing you to create an account.)
@Mewtamer Regarding Agatha Christie any book is good as a start. If you want a recommendation I would name the first Miss-Marple-novel “The Murder at the Vicarage” (though some people might find it too dry). The two books named by @Draconis are a good start, too.
By Isaac Asimov I would recommend “I, robot”. I’ve read it myself and it is excellent imho.
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The other day I finished All You Need Is Kill the Japanese novel that was the basis for the movie Edge of Tomorrow
The first one I read was Pyramids which is also a standalone and a pretty good starting point. I think that was before Small Gods came out though …
Guards! Guards! is also a good starting point if you want to get in a little earlier because it’s the first of its sub-series (the City Watch) but came when the series was slightly more established than Equal Rites (the first Witches novel) or Mort (the first Death novel).
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I think my favorite of the series are Maskerade and Unseen Academicals, which are pretty far into their respective sub-series but have a different enough focus that you don’t really need the previous ones for context (Maskerade has the witches take a field trip to a different setting, Unseen Academicals focuses on the university staff instead of the wizards).
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Read (in most but not all cases reread) the first ten Discworld books in order in the past four or five months. Of those, I would say Guards! Guards! is the clear stand-out, with great characters and the most mature plotting. Pyramids is also very good. Wyrd Sisters if you are into Shakespeare (although the plot becomes a bit scattered near the end of the book) or Moving Pictures if you like early Hollywood and Lovecraft.
The first book I ever read was the The Colour of Magic, in Dutch, with some of the puns translated into unintelligibility. Apparently it didn’t stop me from reading more!
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I started reading them when I went to an author signing for Sir Terry and brought my copy of Good Omens. He was touring for Thud! and asked if anybody in the room was new to Discworld. I few of us raised our hand and he said “well you’ve picked a terrible place to start.”
He went on that he tried to make the books so that you could jump in anywhere without needing a lot of backstory but that Thud! was an exception so we shoud pick almost any other book first.
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It’s great. I loved how he connected his short stories with the robo-psychologist Susan Calvin interview. Clever strategy. I also loved how the complexity of the robot brains required a human psychologist to evaluate (and possibly maintain) their mental health. Even in his mind, the positronic brains were too complex for humans to understand and modify. How did that prediction pane out? Spot on, I’d say, given how AI works today. (Not bad for 1950s philosophizing!)
His first full novel was The Caves of Steel and came about from the pressure from his publisher. Asimov never felt comfortable with writing a full length novel before that and his publisher gave him the hook he needed to write Caves of Steel… write a novel about how a detective has to work with a robot (during times where robots are taking human jobs) and not only does he have to solve the case, he needs to do so in a manner that proves the worth of humanity moving forward. He’s in competition with his metal partner.
Isaac’s eyes apparently lit up and it was off to the races after that. I’ll be starting Caves of Steel very soon. I’m so looking forward to it. 
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World War I has ended. Europe lies in ruins. In the following decade, four deep thinkers attempt to make sense of their world in the cultural wasteland.
- Martin Heidegger retreats to his cabin on the mountain. He rages against the storm and looks into the abbyss (a bit too deeply perhaps…)
- Walter Benjamin drifts aimlessly from city to city, and manages to distill a caleidoscopic view of the Great by careful examination of the Small.
- Ernst Cassirer calmly and steadily works toward his great theory of humanity’s symbolic ways to express the world.
- And Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein publishes a masterpiece to silence all masterpieces and retreats to the countryside where he teaches eight-year-old children. By the second half of the decade he becomes unsatisfied with what he wrote and begins to compose a completely different approach.
Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians: 1919-1929, the great decade of Philosophy is a fascinating cultural history of post-WWI philosophy.
(@VictorGijsbers , since you translated the Tractatus, I thought this might be of interest to you?)
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Sounds great! Did you read it? Is it good?
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I just finished it. I think it was great. The fact that there are four philosophers with their own approaches (and key-concepts and idiosyncratic jargon) demands that the reader pay attention and be ready to switch viewpoint to think along, but the author does a good job at signalling the transitions between chapters and thinkers.
Originally in German: Zeit der Zauberer. I read the Dutch translation: Het Tijdperk van de Tovenaars.
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I’ll put it on my wishlist!
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Doen!
I knew next to nothing about the first three, and only a small bit about Wittgenstein (Ray Monk’s biography is wonderful).
I especially liked that Eilenberger emphasises the fact that despite Wittgenstein’s insistence that nothing meaningful can be said about metaphysical questions, that does not mean that Wittgenstein dismisses the metaphysical (the mystical realm) altogether. It is there.
It gives a fascinating personal tension to the character of Wittgenstein and his view of the world.
I’ve read at least a little bit of all four of them, and also two Wittgenstein biographies and Friedman’s book The Parting of the Ways, which is about Heidegger, Cassirer and Carnap. But I’m far from an expert on the period! I’m seeing some very good reviews too.
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The book starts and ends with Wittgenstein. The opening chapter describes the absurdity of his defense of the (10 years old by this time) Tractatus in front of Russel and Moore to be admitted as fellow to Trinity College. The final chapter describes his turning away from formal constructed languages and toward natural language as the main way to describe and understand reality.
The other main arc of the book, the event it works toward from beginning to end, is the confrontation of Heidegger and Cassirer (and their respective worldviews) at the conference in Davos.
(And as I said, Benjamin wanders in and out of view, a fascinating character in his own right, but also a bit of comic relief through his bumbling and procrastinating approach to life and work.)
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Having given up on Goblin Slayer for it becoming dull, and having then consumed the entirety of Gunslinger Girl in two days (wonderful manga), I am currently reading Howl’s Moving Castle.
I’m on chapter 15 and finding it hard to put down. It has a lovely energy; I can enjoy straight-up fantasy, but I much prefer stories that reference genre stereotypes in themselves, and use it as part of characterization. For instance, and this is stuff from the very beginning of the book, the way that our protagonist is the eldest of three siblings, and therefore she knows best than to expect anything to go her way; and the youngest and middle siblings are equally given their folk-story-appropriate role to play, at least until they demonstrate their independence. It reminds me of The Last Unicorn and all the modern stuff they cut from the film; and some that was not cut, like how the prince is very aware of the role that the prince must play in a fantasy story (and how he does it all to win over Lady Amalthea, but finds that nothing works, which vexes him to no end considering that he’s playing his part appropriately).
The writing is delightfully straight-forward, conjuring up easily visualised scenes that can get seriously funny. So far it’s been perfectly paced. I had seen the film a few times, and knew that it diverged significantly from the book, so I was curious to read the source material and I’m very glad I’m doing that; it’s worth experiencing, separately from the film. The film and the novels seem to co-exist very peacefully as two versions of a story, told by two different storytellers, and both are worth experiencing, without either being superior to the other (except in the sense that, without the novel, there would have been no film).
No, but seriously, I’m having loads of fun.
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Current main reading, on my Kindle as usual, so I can read with the utterly gargantuan font needed now due to my progressive neurological disease. A mix of fiction and non fiction. Full details in the alt text.
Alt text for the picture above
A screenshot of a greyscale Kindle Paperwhite e-reader held in portrait mode. 6 book covers are visible, in 2 rows of 3. On the top row are “Shakespeare” by Bill Bryson (featuring a cartoon version of Shakespeare sitting on top of a Globe like theatre), then “The All Souls Complete Books 1-3” by Deborah Harkness (the “Discovery of Witches” series, and I am rereading book 3 in there, “The Book of Life”), then “The Book of English Magic” (with woodcut like illustrations on the white cover) by Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate. Then on the row below are “The Haunted Library: Tales of Cursed Books and Forbidden Shelves” edited by Tanya Kirk in the British Library “Tales of the Weird” series (the cover features a woman in old style dress looking towards disturbingly curving bookshelves and strange figures), “Echolands: A Journey in Search of Boudica” by Duncan Mackay, and a “Complete Sherlock Holmes” collection. Percentage progresses are given for most of the books. I am well through the Bill Bryson, Boudica and Holmes books. The Deborah Harkness book looks far through from the quoted 68%, but I’m rereading the 3rd book in there, and have only newly started that last night. The magic and library books are newly started too.
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Finishing up Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. Really wonderful science fiction book, and the first in a trilogy. She effortlessly creates a deep, rich, fascinating world without feeling as though she’s some worldbuilding dork who just wants to rattle on about her cool ideas. She creates moving and complicated characters, and weaves together a story of political intrigue with the best of them. Haven’t finished yet but I feel comfortable saying this book will stay with me a long time.
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I’ve just finished reading Alice through the Needle’s Eye, by Gilbert Adair, illustrated by Jenny Thorne.
Billed as “a third adventure for Lewis Carroll’s Alice”, it’s actually the third third Alice adventure that I’ve read so far.
Adair seems to have an innate grasp of Carroll’s style and way of thinking. You could almost believe you were reading a long-lost third installment by the original author. Likewise, Jenny Thorne’s illustrations are remarkably close in style to Tenniel’s. As an Alice fan, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
For my next book, I decided to choose from among the numerous unread volumes in my collection. My hand hovered briefly over James Joyce’s Ulysses, which has had a bookmark stuck in it about a third of the way through for about twenty years. Instead, my hand inexplicably veered right and picked out a somewhat slimmer Irish novel, Spike Milligan’s Puckoon, which I have somehow never got around to reading despite being a Milligan fan. One night in, I am a third of the way through Puckoon, but this state of affairs is unlikely to remain for long. It is very, very funny. And short.
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