I picked up this book in a charity shop because Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books are raved about, and this is the first in the series. I got about 100 pages in before I gave up. I’m told later books are better and this one is more scene setting, but in 100 pages barely anything happened, and I just didn’t care about the things that did.
The book is split into four sections, and so when I reached the end of the first one, I admitted defeat, I just didn’t care enough to carry on. If you enjoyed this book, I do apologise – maybe one day I’ll try a different one in the series from recommendations I’ve been given…
For now I’m looking forward to trying something different.
TBH The Colour Of Magic is one of the best of the Discworld novels, along with The Light Fantastic, although written a little differently to be self-contained, since I doubt he expected the whole discworld universe to take of in the way it did. After that they become generally very formulaic in a boy-meets-girl, disaster looms and in some magical fashion everything gets put right so B&G can be together. Towards the end he was writing stories for political purposes, and they can be either pleasing or irritating depending on whether you believe a conservative government to be the lesser or greater of 2 evils.
TBH I eventually got bored with Pratchett and his slightly smug anti-Christian worldview, and no amount of re-hashing the 5 or 6 themes/character sets (Rincewind & unseen university/Watchmen & Patrician/Witches/Death/Dwarves) was enough to overcome that. After a break of several years I read the very last book he wrote (Raising Steam) and wished I’d not bothered because it left a slightly sour memory of the rest of his work.
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