The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett

For literal years I have had people telling me “You love ____; you’d really love Terry Pratchett.” The blank could be filled with a lot of different things, but suffice it to say that a lot of people who share my taste in fantasy, comedy, absurdity, etc, are also rabid Pratchett fans and have assured me I would like his books too.

My next question, since Pratchett wrote a gazillion of the Discworld novels that aren’t chronological from one to the next, is always, “OK, where should I start?” And that’s when I begin getting long, convoluted explanations about how, well, there’s no first book, there are a lot of places to enter the series, it all depends if you’re more interested in X or Y, etc ….

It’s honestly all been a bit overwhelming.

A former student who was in the “you love all these things so you’d probably also love Pratchett” category loaned me her copy of Hogfather a few Christmas breaks ago, and while I enjoyed reading it, I didn’t feel fully drawn into Pratchett’s world or eager to read more. So I decided to try again with The Colour of Magic, which is technically the “first” Discworld book even though is officially no first Discworld book, so I could at least get properly introduced to the world.

This went a bit better, and I did enjoy The Colour of Magic and found it funny. I liked the hapless wizard Rincewind, and apparently he is in other books too, so I’d probably enjoy those. Pratchett’s humour reminds me a lot of Douglas Adams’s humour – that same sort of self-aware kind of absurdity that made me laugh so hard when I first picked up the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when I was nineteen. This reminded me of that, though not quite as laugh-out-loud funny — but it might be that I’m not nineteen anymore and that type of humour is less of a surprise than it was then? Anyway, I do have plans to read at least one other Discworld book, maybe more, so watch this space to see if I get fully drawn in to Pratchett’s world.