#RIPXVII Terry Pratchett
Rincewind the Wizzard
Quick Scan:
- Rincewind starts out in The Colour of Magic, the first book of the series
- He is hired as a guide for the tourist Twoflower.
- The Rincewind series (8 books)
- follows the misadventures of the Rincewind.
- These books are often used to explore the more remote and unknown parts of the Discworld.
Update: 03 September:
- The Colour of Magic
- … it was impossible to read (first 50 pages) without doing some research
- …via Terry Pratchett Wiki page.
- Without this website I could not follow the story!
- DNF after reading 25%
- …putting this book on the back burner.
- After a good nights sleep….
- I will TRY to finish the AUDIO book!
- Great A’Tuin is a turtle…with four World Elephants and a disc-shaped world
- Ankh-Morpork is the largest city on the Disc with about a million inhabitants.
- It is also one of the most common locations for the Discworld stories.
- This is all difficult to digest
- ….I need time to settle into Pratchett’s bizarre Discworld!
SEPTEMBER
Finish date: 22 September 2022
Genre: novel (pg 228)
Rating: D
Good news: I know there are better books to come in the Discworld series so it is now a matter of gritting my teeth and getting through this book. Paperback was not readable b/c my mind could not grasp the world-building and quirky characters that keep popping up! Switched to audio book and use the “voices” to differentiate as to who’s who!
Bad news: This is THE most difficult audio book I’ve encountered ins many years. Luckily is is just 7 hrs 58 min. Terrible narration …but that is the least of my worries. I just have to understand what’s going on!
Bad news: The narrator is definitely not my favourite. 90% of his character voices sound like a whiney 10 year old. I just had top grin and bear it!
NOTE: 27 October 2022: A scheduled publication of new audiobooks is expected…so perhaps wait until then…listen to a sample and perhaps you will like it (Audible.com)
Bad news: I have NO imagination. I struggled in the beginning to understand what Pratchett was saying! Example: Rincewind has luggage with hundreds of little legs. Prachett used our modern “carry on luggage with wheels” and turned it into something for Discworld. The luggage follows him everywhere, generally attacking anything it perceives as a threat to Rincewind. Another example: inn-sewer-ants-polly-sea = insurance policy
If I don’t get through this…I’ll never finish this series!
Personal: Not the best book to start a series….I’m sure many people gave up as I almost did. Now that I have finally finished this book I want to move quickly on to better books in Prachett’s imaginative world!
NOTES:
- The DISC Gods played games with the fates of people so they had
- …a large temple-like game room at the top of the whole thing.
- Here they used a large round flat game-board which was actually the Disc.
- The game was like a board game and there was
- …a pin in the center of the board shaped like Cori Celesti.
- Blind Io is the Chief of the Gods.
- He is completely blind but instead has countless eyes orbiting his head.
- He and the other gods play games with the lives of mortals.
- NOTE:
- I am in AWE the world-building
- …the work of Pratchett’s amazing imagination!!
Sea trolls:
- A sea troll was a species of troll. Sea trolls were made up of animated water.
- They were not native to the Discworld and came from Bathys.
- Sea Trolls are elemental (…all water!) unlike the native Discworld trolls.
- NOTE: Troll comes from another Discworld: Bathys = completely of water (see image)
- How does Pratchett think of all this? BATHYS = Bath = bathtub or BATH, England!
Good news:
- This is a great series of 41 books…and so worth the time and effort to read them!
- WHERE TO START WITH DISCWORLD?
- The Discworld is the fictional setting of Terry Pratchett’s most iconic series.
- All the Discworld novels take place on a flat, circular world which sits on the back of four elephants
- …which stand on the back of a giant star turtle.
- Although this world may look and sound completely different to our own
- the Discworld novels explore a multitude of very human issues.
- You’ll find all 41 Discworld novels with short synopsis
- … in the order they were published. “HERE”
- The Discworld novels can be read in any order!
I
NancyElin.blog 
I think you are right, The Colour of Light is not the best book to start with. I read Book 2, The Light Fantastic, as my first book by Pratchett and it was a difficult read. The next book I read was Mort, and that one was much better. Now I just need to read more of them.
Tracy, so true…this book was awful but I read that the series only gets better.
I read MORT years ago and loved it…very funny so I knew I should give Pratchett more reading time. In The Colour of Magic there were more puns and word plays than humor (Temple of Bel-Shamroth) shamrock? I had to read info on the Dicsworld Wikipedia (see link) before I listened to the audio.
Reading a French book this weekend just to remind myself I haven’t forgotten my FR vocabulary! But it feels like riding a bike…once you have the “basics” you can jump on any bike and start peddling again!
I too started with Mort, though more by good fortune than anything else, and was later warned off The Colour of Magic. I subsequently dabbled in a few other titles at random before going for the Witches series and the Tiffany Aching books, which I adored.
Here are some reviews and posts mentioning Pterry (as I understand he’s sometimes referred to as):
https://calmgrove.wordpress.com/tag/terry-pratchett/?orderby=date&order=ASC
Thanks so much for your review link…Terry Pratchett was such a fascinating man…and has left us far too soon. I still get chills when I think of his unique world-building imagination and it being snuffed out by dementia. So sad…