Fantastical absurdity and wry amusement at human (and nonhuman) foolishness. I read a scant handful of books from Pratchett’s famous Discworld series when I was a teen and enjoyed them, but they didn’t captivate me sufficiently for me to go out of my way to find more of them at the time. But recently, on a whim, I decided to make this another instance of going into an older author’s work and (in theory, who knows if I’ll actually do it) making my way through. This is the first book in the series – which I probably won’t read in publication order, but I at least started here. My reading confirms the commentary I saw while deciding whether or not I wanted to do this, namely that this is a pretty unexceptional instalment of the series and Pratchett hadn’t quite found his stride yet. Still, being back in this world evoked some vaguely pleasant nostalgia, and the book wasn’t bad. Though I didn’t love the ways in which the use of high fantasy and sword-and-sorcery as the scaffolding for its absurdity and humour brought along the embedded traces of the colonial that are pretty much unavoidable in those genres – I’m hoping Pratchett’s satire unsettles that a bit in future books. In any case, I’ll likely come back to this series once in awhile over the coming years.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.