Book Review: The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic

I’ll say this first: I don’t usually review books—I mainly read them, collect my favorite quotes, and make little notes for myself as I go. But on the other hand, I also don’t find myself reading a book that’s so good that it deserves to be reviewed, to spread the word so that others can enjoy it as much as I did. So, here I am—I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic and look forward to the rest of the Discworld books.

I picked up The Colour of Magic earlier this year because I’d heard good things about Terry Pratchett, though I’d never actually read any of his work. To my surprise, the book comforted me with its original world full of quirky characters, misadventures, and humor. More recently, I also finished The Light Fantastic, the second novel in the Rincewind series—and now I wonder why I hadn’t heard of Terry Pratchett sooner. You’ll like his writing if you’re into fantasy novels but also enjoy a healthy dose of humor.

Below are my thoughts on these two books, accompanied by quotes. Hopefully it goes without saying that there are plenty of spoilers ahead.

Table of Contents

It’s Turtles All the Way Down

The Colour of Magic introduces readers to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, home to dungeons, dragons, biting social commentary, and plenty of irony.

The Discworld is not a coherent fantasy world. Its geography is fuzzy, its chronology unreliable. A small traveling circle of firelight in a chilly infinity has turned out to be the home of defiant jokes and last chances. There are no maps. You can’t map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know that There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.

The Discworld is a flat-Earther’s dream: a planet that rests upon the backs of four giant elephants—which, in turn, stand atop the meteor-pocked carapace of Great A’Tuin the World Turtle. It’s a pretty clear reference to the World Turtle of various mythologies.

Image source: Discworld.com shop

The seas of the Disc empty into the vast expanse of cosmos through which A’Tuin swims, forming the Rimfall. It’s here, at the edge, that one can observe the magnificent Rimbow… or, you know, fall overboard.

The Disc, being flat, has no real horizon. Any adventurous sailors who got funny ideas from staring at eggs and oranges for too long and set out for the antipodes soon learned that the reason why distant ships sometimes looked as though they were disappearing over the edge of the world was that they WERE disappearing over the edge of the world.

The academicians of the Discworld postulate that A’Tuin the World Turtle came from nowhere and is now swimming aimlessly through the universe. But this is just one theory.

An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.

It all started with a big bang. And that bang was a bunch of World Turtles mounting each other in space and shooting out Baby World Turtles.

How do the auxiliary elephants reproduce? This is one of the many unanswered philosophical questions of the Discworld. There are others…

The early astrozoologists, hauled back from their long dangle by enormous teams of slaves, were able to bring back much information about the shape and nature of A’Tuin and the elephants but this did not resolve fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of the universe.

For example, what was A’Tuin’s actual sex? This vital question, said the astrozoologists with mounting authority, would not be answered until a larger and more powerful gantry was constructed for a deep-space vessel. In the meantime they could only speculate about the revealed cosmos.

I absolutely love the intro to The Colour of Magic. Most fantasy authors take the genre too seriously and try to paint colorful worlds that are somewhat believable, with long, drawn-out prose about what people are wearing or what their world looks like. But the Discworld is so consistent in its absurdity that it’s actually quite realistic, and therefore doesn’t require much exposition. Pratchett uses these few pages in the intro as an opportunity to mock religion and politics. That pattern actually continues throughout the rest of the books, though they’re more than just random pieces of commentary and jokes strung together against the backdrop of an undeveloped world—there’s an actual story with lovable characters.

I especially like that The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic don’t bury themselves in tired fantasy tropes of the dungeons-and-dragons sort—you know, swords, chain mail, dragons, and the likes. The best way to put it is that the books don’t take themselves very seriously, and neither should you. There are lots of creative spins on the genre’s norms—like how dragons hang upside down from metallic rings fastened to the ceilings of their caves, or how trolls turn to stone during the day.

Two Heroes Skirt Death

Thus begins our story—on the back of Great A’Tuin, on the Discworld, in the city of Ankh-Morpork.

Painting by Andrei Stef

It’s here that we meet the failed wizard Rincewind, the main protagonist of the story. Shortly before Rincewind was expelled from Unseen University, one of the eight spells of the Octavo—an ancient grimoire housing unbelievable power—managed to lodge itself inextricably in his mind. This unfortunate incident prevented Rincewind from learning any useful spells and earned him a reputation for magical ineptitude. In short, Rincewind is a wizard without any of the implications and with all of the vulnerabilities.

Image source: The Art of Discworld

Life is great for Rincewind—until he meets Twoflower, a wealthy tourist who hails from the Counterweight Continent seeking… ahh, what’s the word again?

Excitement.

Image source

‘I thought I made myself clear this morning, Rincewind. I want to see genuine Morporkian life—the slave market, the Whore Pits, the Temple of Small Gods, the Beggars’ Guild… and a genuine tavern brawl.’ A faint note of suspicion entered Twoflower’s voice. ‘You do have them, don’t you? You know, people swinging on chandelier, swordfights over the table, the sort of thing Hrun the Barbarian and the Weasel are always getting involved in. You know—excitement.’

Shortly after meeting Twoflower, Rincewind is (begrudgingly) hired to serve as his guide—to be paid handsomely in gold coins, and to attract all manner of misfortune and near-death experiences.

‘If you think the total disruption of my life for the last year is satisfactory then you might be right. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve nearly been killed —’

‘Twenty-seven,’ said Twoflower.

‘What?’

‘Twenty-seven times,’ said Twoflower helpfully. ‘I worked it out. But you never actually have.’

Meanwhile, Twoflower is the epitome of naivety and blissful ignorance, completely oblivious to most things going on around him. When something goes terribly wrong—and it almost always does in his presence—Twoflower will remark at how quaint or picturesque it is rather than doing the sensible thing and panicking.

Twoflower didn’t just look at the world through rose-tinted spectacles, Rincewind knew – he looked at it through a rose-tinted brain, too, and heard it through rose-tinted ears.

Fortunately for our two characters, they’re not alone in this dangerous world…

The Luggage

Rincewind took a few steps forward, cupidity moving him as easily as if he were on little wheels. The chest was open. There were bags inside, and in one of them he caught the gleam of gold. For a moment greed overcame caution, and he reached out gingerly… but what was the use? He’d never live to enjoy it. Reluctantly he drew his hand back, and was surprised to see a slight tremor in the chest’s open lid. Hadn’t it shifted slightly, as though rocked by the wind?

Rincewind looked at his fingers, and then at the lid. It looked heavy, and was bound with brass bands. It was quite still now.

What wind?

The Luggage is featured on the cover art of The Colour of Magic and houses all of Twoflower’s belongings—clean underwear, a camera, a wealth of gold, and various other tourist essentials. It also happens to be sentient and obediently follows its master wherever he goes, ambling along on hundreds of tiny legs.

The Luggage is, in my opinion, the most lovable character—none of Pratchett’s humor brings as wide a smile to my face as when he’s writing about the Luggage. It’s an overprotective, indestructible little chest that swallows men whole. It behaves, in many ways, like a guard dog—vicious when it needs to be, but otherwise gentle and cuddly.

Image source: The Colour of Magic cover art, by Josh Kirby

The Luggage makes several notable appearances throughout these books. Amusingly, Pratchett often alludes to the Luggage indirectly; there are brief scenes scattered here and there where shamans, heroes, and other unfortunate characters encounter the Luggage, and are subsequently mutilated, eaten whole, or compelled to ponder life’s various questions, such as “why is that chest moving?” Pratchett rarely mentions the Luggage by name, characterizing it instead as an oblong mass of wood that darts to and fro and terrorizes everyone in its path.

At the furthermost end of Short Street a dark oblong rose on hundreds of tiny legs, and started to run. At first it moved at no more than a lumbering trot, but by the time it was halfway up the street it was moving arrow-fast…

Something else was coming up the aisle. Something big and oblong and wooden and brass-bound. It had hundreds of legs. If it was what it seemed—a walking chest of the kind that appeared in pirate stories brim full of ill-gotten gold and jewels—then what would have been its lid suddenly gaped open.

The Thing looked like an ordinary wooden sea chest. A bit larger than usual, maybe, but not suspiciously so. But while it sometimes seemed to contain things like old socks and miscellaneous luggage, at other times—and he shuddered—it seemed to be, seemed to be, seemed to have… He tried not to think about it. It was just that the men who had been drowned overboard had probably been more fortunate than those it had caught. He tried not to think about it. There had been teeth, teeth like white wooden gravestones, and a tongue red as mahogany…

Something was coming along the Fence, in giant loping bounds that covered meters at a time. It loomed up at him and for a moment Terton saw something rectangular, multilegged, shaggy with seaweed and—although it had absolutely no features from which he could have deduced this—it was also very angry indeed.

As a gesture of thanks and a token of their friendship, Twoflower gives the Luggage to Rincewind as a parting gift at the end of The Light Fantastic. You can tell that Rincewind actually cares about the Luggage, even though he feigns indifference and annoyance in its presence.

Rincewind watched it until it was a dot. Then he looked down at the Luggage. It stared back at him.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Go away. I’m giving you to yourself, do you understand?’

He turned his back on it and stalked away. After a few seconds he was aware of the little footsteps behind him. He spun around.

‘I said I don’t want you!’ he snapped, and gave it a kick.

The Luggage sagged. Rincewind stalked away.

After he had gone a few yards he stopped and listened. There was no sound. When he turned the Luggage was where he had left it. It looked sort of huddled. Rincewind thought for a while.

‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

I’m not crying, you are…

Librarians Go Ook

Painting by David Wyatt

At Unseen University, among columns of dusty bookshelves and old wax candles, you will find the ever-obedient librarians—who will assist you in locating a book to read, pick lice from your hair, and accept payment in the form of bananas.

Then the librarian was back, a slim volume in his hands.

‘Oook,’ he said.

Trymon took it gingerly.

The cover was scratched and very dog-eared, the gold of its lettering had long ago curled off, but he could just make out, in the old magic tongue of the Tsort Valley, the words: Iyt Gryet Teymple hyte Tsort, Y Hiystory Myistical.

‘Oook?’ said the librarian, anxiously.

If it’s not already obvious, Librarians are not human—they’re apes!

When I first read this scene, I immediately recalled the video game Metro 2033. In that game, Librarians are giant ape monsters in the ruins of the old libraries of post-apocalyptic Moscow. After some quick research, I learned that this is no coincidence. Apparently, Dmitry Glukhovsky, the author of the books on which the Metro games are based, grew up reading lots of different fantasy series, including some from Terry Pratchett. With this context in mind, it actually makes sense that the Librarians of the Metro world are an homage to the Discworld. Pretty neat if you ask me!

The Flexibility of Dialogue

I first learned of Terry Pratchett and The Colour of Magic back in 2019 on the Writing StackExchange network, where a user asked how one can use special font to distinguish a god’s speech from others. One of the best rated answers mentions Death, a key character in Pratchett’s Discworld universe and the embodiment of sickle and bones.

Whereas all other characters “speak like this,” Death SPEAKS LIKE THIS. This violates all traditional rules of dialogue, giving Death a truly intimidating and ominous air—you can almost hear his hell-deep voice booming out of the pages. Quotes are unnecessary; when Death speaks, everyone takes note.

In The Colour of Magic, Pratchett employs a similar device to portray the Wyrmberg’s dragons, who speak telepathically with their riders. Thus, their words appear not in quotes or all-caps but as undecorated narration. Their words blend into the surrounding writing, much as they seep into the minds of their masters.

But perhaps my favorite use of dialogue is early in The Colour of Magic, on the docks of Ankh-Morpork, where Twoflower arrives aboard a ship and attempts to communicate in the language of a Morporkian beggar, with the assistance of a dictionary:

Subtle changes in the beggar’s posture made the stranger feel more at ease. He consulted the small book again.

“I wish to be directed to a hotel, tavern, lodging house, inn, hospice, caravanserai,” he said.

“What, all of them?” said Hugh, taken aback.

“?” said the stranger.

Nothing quite conveys Twoflower’s inability to understand a different language than him rattling off a bunch of synonyms for taverns. Your mind is also given the creative freedom to picture how someone would respond with punctuation. It’s one of my favorite exchanges in the entire book.

All these little details give Pratchett’s writing a distinctly comical identity; he finds so many interesting ways to give his characters personality without relying on drawn out exposition, colorful prose, and other common literary strategies.

Knocking on the Fourth Wall

Pratchett regularly jokes with his reader, without actually ruining the writing or, as the saying goes, breaking the fourth wall. One of my favorite examples of this is in The Light Fantastic, where Pratchett very clearly references himself as well as the cover art of the book:

In fact, the hero even at this moment galloping towards the Vortex Plains didn’t get involved in this kind of argument, because they didn’t take it seriously – mainly because this particular hero was a heroine. A redheaded one.

Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one’s shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, thighboots and naked blades.

Words like ‘full’, ‘round’ and even ‘pert’ creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down.

The same book also introduces a key character named Cohen the Barbarian, an obvious homage to Conan. In the book, he’s just as legendary as Conan, except old age has made him wiser, given him severe back problems, and taken most of his teeth.

‘But our guest, whose name is legend, must tell us truly: what is it that a man may call the greatest things in life?’

The guest paused in the middle of another unsuccessful attempt to light up.

‘What shay?’ he said, toothlessly.

‘I said: what is it that a man may call the greatest things in life?’

The warriors leaned closer. This should be worth hearing.

The guest thought long and hard and then said, with deliberation: ‘Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.’

There’s also the exchange between Rincewind and the druid (or “computer hardware specialist” as he calls himself) on the big floating rock in the sky. Though it’s a bit too long to quote here.

Another great scene takes place in a limbo-like plane of existence, where Twoflower attempts to teach Death, War, Famine, and Pestilence how to play bridge (a much more complicated version of it, at least).

‘What, playing with cards?’

‘It’s a special kind of playing,’ said Twoflower. ‘It’s called—’ he hesitated. Language wasn’t his strong point. ‘In your language it’s called a thing you put across a river, for example,’ he concluded, ‘I think.’

‘Aqueduct?’ hazarded Rincewind. ‘Fishing line? Weir? Dam?’

‘Yes, possibly.’

But of all these, who can forget the classic scene from The Colour of Magic, where Rincewind and Twoflower are momentarily transported through a time ripple into an alternate dimension—one aboard a Trans World Airlines flight that’s being hijacked, as Dr. Rjinswand and Jack Zweiblumen. This scene was actually so confusing at first that I had to re-read it twice to understand what happened. But that made it all the more hilarious once I realized what was going on.

An awkward feeling around the leg regions made Rincewind look down. His clothes had changed, too. Instead of the comfortable old robe, so marvelously well-adapted for speed into action in all possible contingencies, his legs were encased in cloth tubes. He was wearing a jacket of the same gray material…

Until now he’d never heard the language the man with the amulet was using. It was uncouth and vaguely Hublandish—so why could he understand every word?

Let’s see, they’d suddenly appeared in this dragon after, they’d materialized in this drag, they’d sudd, they’d, they’d—they had struck up a conversation in the airport so naturally they had chosen to sit together on the plane, and he’d promised to show Jack Zweiblumen around when they got back to the States. Yes, that was it. And then Jack had been taken ill and he’d panicked and come through here and surprised this hijacker. Of course. What on earth was “Hublandish?”

Dr. Rjinswand rubbed his forehead. What he could do with was a drink.

On the Topic of Religion

In the real world, people often use religion to rationalize irrational behaviors and explain the unexplainable. Pratchett regularly jabs at the hypocrisy and absurdity of religion through Rincewind and various other characters, most notably in the scene where Bethan is about to be sacrificed by druids. Twoflower, naive as he is, wonders why they’re sacrificing the poor girl. Rincewind responds:

‘Don’t ask me. To make the crops grow or the moon rise or something. Or maybe they’re just keen on killing people. That’s religion for you.’

Twoflower proposes that the druids instead sacrifice flowers or fruits…

Rincewind sighed. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘No self-respecting High Priest is going to go through all the business with the trumpets and the processions and the banners and everything, and then shove his knife into a daffodil and a couple of plums. You’ve got to face it, all this stuff about golden boughs and the cycles of nature and stuff just boils down to sex and violence, usually at the same time.’

But one of the more obvious examples of religion gone wrong can be found towards the end of The Light Fantastic. In the novel, as Great A’Tuin approaches dangerously close to a giant red star in the universe, the people of the Disc turn to superstition. They paint red stars on their foreheads and doors, burn any magical books they can get their hands on, and indiscriminately hunt all magical beings, blaming them for supposedly angering the cosmos (and for their inability to avert this catastrophe).

There was something very oppressive about the city, Rincewind decided. There was also something very odd. Almost every door was painted with a large red star.

‘It’s creepy,’ said Bethan. ‘As if people wanted to bring the star here.’

‘Or keep it away,’ said Twoflower.

These scenes reminded me of Rick and Morty’s Get Schwifty episode, where the people of Earth react to the presence of the Giant Heads by adopting Headism as their official religion.

Image source: Rick and Morty Fandom. Copyright of Adult Swim.

Certain characters use this as an opportunity to gain influence and manipulate others to their liking. They sacrifice criminals—thieves, goths, and movie talkers—in an attempt to appease the giant heads.

Of course, any discussion of religion would be incomplete without mentioning gods. In your typical fantasy world, gods are portrayed as higher beings who do not meddle in human affairs. On the Discworld, the gods play Dungeons & Dragons—or at least the Disc’s equivalent… And the pieces on their board happen to be Rincewind, Twoflower, and the various friends and foes they encounter.

Drawing by Paul Kidby

I can’t help but feel this is a mockery of those who claim that God works in mysterious ways—if reality is anything like the Disc, then gods couldn’t care less about their creations. God loves his children (that’s why he kills ‘em, after all).

The room was silent as she scrabbled in her box of pieces and, from the very bottom, produced a couple that she set down on the board with two decisive clicks. The rest of the players, as one god, craned forward to peer at them.

‘A wenegade wiffard and fome fort of clerk,’ said Offler the Crocodile God, hindered as usual by his tusks. ‘Well, weally!’ With one claw he pushed a pile of bone-white tokens into the center of the table.

The Lady nodded slightly. She picked up the dice cup and held it as steady as a rock, yet all the gods could hear the three cubes rattling about inside. And then she sent them bouncing across the table.

This makes Rincewind’s misfortune all the more amusing and ironic. To the gods above, perched on their thrones in Cori Celesti, everything is just a game. Later, in The Light Fantastic, the gods are portrayed as embittered old people who file lawsuits against their neighbors, the Ice Giants, for playing loud music and failing to return the lawnmower they borrowed. In a nutshell, the gods are too preoccupied with these affairs to actually—oh, I don’t know—stop the world from being destroyed.

A Compilation of My Favorite Quotes

Below are some more quotes from The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. There are far too many good ones to include here—Terry Pratchett has some ridiculously quotable writing—so I’ve mainly picked my favorites and categorized them by themes.

Twoflower’s naivety

Strangely enough, he was not particularly worried. Twoflower was a tourist, the first of the species to evolve on the Disc, and fundamental to his very existence was the rock-hard belief that nothing bad could really happen to him because he was not involved; he also believed that anyone could understand anything he said provided he spoke loudly and slowly, that people were basically trustworthy, and that anything could be sorted out among men of goodwill if they just acted sensibly.

On the face of it this gave him a survival value marginally less than, say, a soap herring, but to Rincewind’s amazement it all seemed to work and the little man’s total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away.

On Rincewind’s survival tactics and ineptitude

‘What shall we do?’ said Twoflower.

‘Panic?’ said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival; back in the olden days, his theory went, people faced with hungry sabre-toothed tigers could be divided very simply into those who panicked and those who stood there saying ‘What a magnificent brute!’ and ‘Here, pussy.’

‘You run away a lot,’ said one of the voices. That is good. You are a survivor.’

‘Survivor? I’ve nearly been killed dozens of times!’

‘Exactly.’

‘Oh.’

Rincewind fought as he always fought, without skill or fairness or tactics but with a great deal of whirlwind effort. The strategy was to prevent an opponent getting enough time to realise that in fact Rincewind wasn’t a very good or strong fighter, and it often worked.

Trees can’t talk

The whole “trees can’t talk” bit in The Light Fantastic is one of my favorite running gags in the book.

Several trees tried to strike up a conversation, but Rincewind was nearly certain that this was not normal behaviour for trees and ignored them.

‘Rincewind, the tree said—’

‘Trees can’t talk,’ snapped Rincewind. ‘It’s very important to remember that.’

This one exchange is quite long, but the build-up to the punchline is hilarious:

‘Onions?’ whispered Rincewind. ‘Any onions here?’

‘There’s a patch of them by that old yew tree,’ said a voice beside him.

‘Ah,’ said Rincewind. ‘Good.’

There was a long silence, except for the buzzing of the mosquitoes around Rincewind’s ears.

He was standing perfectly still. He hadn’t even moved his eyes.

Eventually he said, ‘Excuse me.’

‘Yes?’

‘Which one’s the yew?’

‘Small gnarly one with the little dark green needles.’

‘Oh, yes. I see it. Thanks again.’

He didn’t move. Eventually the voice said conversationally, ‘Anything more I can do for you?’

‘You’re not a tree, are you?’ said Rincewind, still staring straight ahead.

‘Don’t be silly. Trees can’t talk.’

‘Sorry. It’s just that I’ve been having a bit of difficulty with trees lately, you know how it is.’

‘Not really. I’m a rock.’

On modernization, efficiency, and the social sciences

Another good example of weaving bits of reality into fantasy as a form of parody:

Younger wizards in particular went about saying that it was time that magic started to update its image and that they should all stop mucking about with bits of wax and bone and put the whole thing on a properly-organised basis, with research programmes and three-day conventions in good hotels where they could read papers with titles like ‘Whither Geomancy?’ and The role of Seven-League Boots in a caring society.’

Trymon, for example, hardly ever did any magic these days but ran the Order with hourglass efficiency and wrote lots of memos and had a big chart on his office wall, covered with coloured blobs and flags and lines that no-one else really understood but which looked very impressive.

‘What’s this paper?’ said Jiglad Wert, of the Hood-winkers, waving the document that had been left in front of him, and waving it all the more forcefully because his own chair, back in his cluttered and comfortable tower, was if anything more ornate than Galder’s had been.

‘It’s an agenda, Jiglad,’ said Trymon, patiently.

On tourism and art

‘Anyway, I’m sure the gnomes wouldn’t really want to sell it, it’s, it’s—,’ he groped through what he knew of Twoflower’s mad vocabulary – ‘it’s a tourist attraction.’

‘What’s that?’ said Swires, interestedly.

‘It means that lots of people like him will come and look at it,’ said Rincewind.

‘Why?’

‘Because—’ Rincewind groped for words – ‘it’s quaint. Urn, oldey worldey. Folkloresque. Er, a delightful example of a vanished folk art, steeped in the traditions of an age long gone.’

‘It is?’ said Swires, looking at the cottage in bewilderment.

‘Yes.’

‘All that?’

‘Fraid so.’

The Luggage, in all its adorable Luggageness

Rincewind looked down. The Luggage regarded him owlishly.

‘What are you looking at?’ said the wizard. ‘He can go back if he wants, why should I bother?’

The Luggage said nothing.

‘Look, he’s not my responsibility,’ said Rincewind. let’s be absolutely clear about that.’

The Luggage said nothing, but louder this time.

Rincewind casts his first spell

Finally!

And the high he experiences has quite a slow burn…

Rincewind looked at him with wild, unseeing eyes.

‘I’ll turn you into a rosebush,’ he said.

‘Yes, yes, jolly good. Just come along,’ said Twoflower soothingly, pulling gently at his arm.

This one gave me a good laugh:

It looked the sort of book described in library catalogues as ‘slightly foxed’, although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.

And of course, there’s also this rather awful pun:

‘Yes, yes,’ said Bethan, sitting down glumly. ‘I know you don’t. Rincewind, all the shops have been smashed open, there was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?’

‘Yeah,’ said Rincewind, picking up a knife and testing its blade thoughtfully. ‘Luters, I expect.’

Miscellaneous humor

Some people just like to watch the world burn… in this case, literally:

‘They say that it’ll hit us on Hogswatchnight and the seas will boil and the countries of the Disc will be broken and kings will be brought down and the cities will be as lakes of glass,’ said the man. ‘I’m off to the mountains.’

‘That’ll help, will it?’ said Rincewind doubtfully.

‘No, but the view will be better.’

One of my favorite Cohen scenes from The Light Fantastic:

They ought to have rushed him. Instead one of them, secure in the knowledge that he had a broadsword and Cohen didn’t, sidled crabwise towards him.

‘Oh, no,’ said Cohen, waving his hands. ‘Oh, come on, lad, not like that.’

The man looked sideways at him.

‘Not like what?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘You never held a sword before?’

The man half-turned to his colleagues for reassurance.

‘Not a lot, no,’ he said. ‘Not often.’ He waved his sword menacingly.

This last one doesn’t leave a whole lot to your imagination, and it’s hilarious:

Rincewind passed her the Octavo without a word.

She opened it and peered the pages.

‘What funny writing,’ she said. ‘It keeps changing. What’s that crocodile thing doing to the octopus?’

Rincewind looked over her shoulder and, without thinking, told her. She was silent for a moment.

‘Oh,’ she said levelly. ‘I didn’t know crocodiles could do that.’

Worth a Read? Ook.

I can’t wait to continue reading the rest of the Rincewind series, as well as some of Pratchett’s other work. I’d heard his writing praised before, but you never really appreciate that sort of thing until you read them yourself and see what all the fuss is about.

At the end of a long and hard day of work, I’d find comfort in Pratchett’s lighthearted fantasy writing. I don’t recall the last time I read a book that actually made me smile, so that’s really saying something.

Admittedly, some of Pratchett’s jokes can be a bit too British (translation: I don’t understand some of them). But overall, his writing is so enjoyable that I stuck around to read two books in a row—and that’s two more than I usually have the patience for these days.

Attributions

The Colour of Magic cover art and The Light Fantastic cover art, as used in this article’s social media preview, are under the copyright of the late Josh Kirby.