Equal Rites
Terry Pratchett's profoundly irreverent novels, consistent number one bestsellers in England, have garnered him a revered position in the halls of parody along with Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and Carl Hiaasen.In Equal Rites, a dying wizard tries to pass on his powers to an eighth son of an eighth son, who is just at that moment being born. The fact that the son is actually a daughter is discovered just a little too late...
Stats for nerds
12recommend
34mentions
28people
2009–2026years
41% recommend53% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I mean addressing the initial proposition - of course a work of satire/parody of the real world is going to be a better basis for thinking about the real world than a work of escapism!
The rest of it, I think, won't persuade anyone to read Discworld novels who's resisted them so far. Those who have and love them will find it a pleasant enough survey.
Oh and I personally think that Equal Rites is the best entry point to the series rather than Sourcery. But then I was reading them in publishing order anyway and eagerly waiting for each new one to come out. Damn I miss being able to look forward to a new Pratchett novel; he was a Wodehouse for my generation.
- I followed the prescribed unofficial Reading Order graphic when I started the series (only 10ish books in), and I've jumped around between all the different protagonists. Color of Magic, Mort, Guards Guards, and the Equal Rites do well enough to show you what the Disc is all about, the absurdity of normalcy, and some of the crazy antics people get into. I think it may be more a matter of what "type" of fiction are you looking for - a constantly terrified Rincewind in a world of magic, a new to the job Mort where no one believes HE is Death, a tired Sam Vimes trying to understand a world that is changing faster than he can keep up, or the witches the reject all the social rules of the land. Really the only one I wouldn't recommend first is Small Gods, but mostly because its very self contained to the Klatchian region while the others are on another continent.
- I did too (a long time ago when I was 13). But I think there was a change in tone with and continuing after Equal Rites, in that the characters and story were a bit more thorough rather than being, essentially, a sketch-show vehicle for parody and quips.
Besides, it introduces Granny Weatherwax, who is IMO one of his two greatest creations (the other being Vimes of course).
Edit: Oh, by the way, if you're just now working your way through them then (a) I envy you and (b) I recommend reading the Annotated Pratchett File for each book - after you finish each of course: https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/
- > The Auditors of Reality are particularly interesting. They are the Discworld edition of what I’ve called the Great Bureaucrat archetype elsewhere. Their ideology is something like the Wokism of Discworld, a deadening, stifling, faceless force of intersectional lifelessness.
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Man this dude sure has a definition of “woke” that is completely alien to the roots of that term.
> I read one Pratchett novel (Thief of Time I think) in college, but I’m glad I didn’t properly get into it till my mid-forties. These are books you cannot really appreciate if you’re too young. I read through the lot around 2017-19, during the first Trump admin, when I was in my early forties.
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Dude they are comic fantasy, yes Pratchett has Things to Say about the world in them, more and more as the series goes on, but I picked up Equal Rites soon after it came out when I was eighteen and the series was a constant delight through my college years and beyond. Yes there are things in Discworld that will zoom right by a kid and only land when you come back to it as an adult. That’s part of why they’re good books. There’s things like that in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Cycle (Book of Three, Black Cauldron, etc) that hit me like a ton of bricks when I pick up those little books forty years after I first read them as a kid and completely missed those parts. Stories can speak to multiple ages on multiple levels.
- "Best" is always too hard - here are a handful that I love.
Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susannah Clarke
The Crow Road - Iain Banks
Equal Rites - Terry Pratchett
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Black Holes & Time Warps - Kip Thorne
The Inventions of Daedalus - David E H Jones
The Cuckoo's Egg - Cliff Stoll
I hope one or two of those float your boat!
- Small Gods and Good Omens are the best starts; then, I'd hit up the Granny Weatherwax books, eg, Equal Rites, Wyrd Sisters, etc.
