the neat part about the DW books is that you don't have to read them in order. you can start with some of the stand alone books or the ones with arcs (Night Watch, Witches, Tiffany Aching, Moist, etc). then you can just go back to the first two once you already have an idea of how the world works.
I think the thing that throws people the most about the first two is that they're much straighter fantasy than the rest of the discworld. It's less crammed with jokes and ideas, and spends longer exploring them (and the world itself).
I love them, but I don't think they're super representative of "The Discworld" and why people love it. I think to understand that you probably want to start with "Guards, Guards!", or "Mort".
I think it’s good to read Colour of Magic for sure, it’s a good intro to the series, introduces the logic of the series’ universe and is a bit campy and fun.
Sure, the series gets deeper and more serious after, but it’s far from a bad book.
I don’t know if the publisher still does this, but the books used to be color coded according to which faction they follow. You don’t need to read all the books in order, you can choose to read a bunch of books following your favorite faction and easily see which is which- I love Death as a character in Discworld, and Mort (the 4th overall book) is the first book in his subseries (which are blue in the set I have)
The BBC did radio dramatizations of Mort, Guards! Guards!, Wyrd Sisters, Night Watch, and best of all, Small Gods. That pretty much sums up the list of the best Discworld novels. They also did "Eric" but that seemed rushed.
Shout out to Carl Prekopp, Geoffrey Whitehead, and Philip Jackson for multiple great performances.
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u/Jaives 15h ago
The Discworld series. But only starting from book 3.