The Light Fantastic

5123VpObYZLJust as I predicted, The Light Fantastic removes most of the complaints I had about The Colour of Magic. Despite being published three years apart, it’s clear that these are one book split in half. Which is nice for me; I’d intended to read something else in between, but there was an unfortunate circumstance whereby I got called away on my weekend suddenly and forgot to grab a new book to read. Luckily, tLF was still in my trunk from when I borrowed it, though.

So, over the past five days, I’ve gone through that at a pretty quick pace. (Quick for me, anyway.) In addition to making up for the abruptness of the previous book, it’s also much more internally coherent and rather a lot more funny as well. Pratchett certainly improved between the two books. Not only that, but the lead characters became less inscrutable (Twoflower) and more likeable (Rincewind). On the whole, then, this was the perfect fluff book to read while hanging about in hospital rooms. I look forward to more of them.

3 thoughts on “The Light Fantastic

  1. Mike Kozlowski

    The first two books are way, way worse than later stuff. Equal Rites, while not as good as later Discworld (he improves pretty continuously up to a certain point), is head and shoulders better than either TCoM or TLF.

    I think I saw Pratchett himself recommending that new readers start with Guards, Guards. Coincidentally, this is where I started reading (due to what the library had in stock a decade ago), and I can verify it works well.

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