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.
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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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