Knowing more or less how events in one novel have, broadly speaking, panned out will not spoil your enjoyment of coming back to the story and reading it later – the fun part is seeing how they got there. It’s about inhabiting a joyous, haphazard, diverse, turvey-topsey world that runs on Narrativium, but with a unique Pterry ptwist on each well-worn fantasy outcome. But the fun of reading the Discworld novels is not about turning the page to see who dies next. There are a few on-going threads with satisfying pay-offs, mostly concerning various characters’ inter-personal relationships, and of course each individual book is tightly plotted and leads to an exciting climax.
It’s also fair to say that the joy of reading these books is not really in following an on-going plot. However, each Discworld story exists entirely independently and can be read as its own novel without reference to any of the others, and details of other novels will be minimal, so really, the adventurous reader can jump in pretty much anywhere. It should also be acknowledged that, as ever, reading books later in the series before earlier ones may spoil some elements of earlier novels. Enthusiastic fans trying to get their friends to read the books rarely recommend these as a starting-point.Īll of this, obviously, presents a complication in the reading order for a fan keen to get to grips with one particular group of stories. The Discworldseries evolved over the course of thirty-two years and forty-one books and the first two or three novels don’t really reflect the complexity of the later books – the first two especially are rather broad spoofs of a certain type of swords ‘n’ sorcery fantasy that was popular in the 1980s. However, if you ask a Discworld fan where to start reading, the differing responses you get will not often involve the very first novel, The Colour Of Magic.
If you haven’t read the Discworld series, you might be thinking this is sure to be a pretty short article, if the whole series follows a simple chronological order.
Overall, however, the books more or less follow the chronological order in which they were written and published. There’s also a substantial time skip in Wyrd Sisters, and Thief Of Time, unsurprisingly, does peculiar things with the timeline, noting that it seemed to be fractured. For the most part, each novel takes place chronologically following the one before, with the possible exception of Small Gods (exactly when Small Gods takes place is debatable, but there are a few indications that it may take place substantially earlier than the other novels). Of course, most people’s first instinct is to read a series of books in the order in which they were released – we won’t list all forty-one books in publication order here, but you can easily find such lists on multiple websites.
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