Quote:
Originally Posted by Freeshadow
Regarding your "older stuff's no good" opinion (which I won't discuss here - too much a topic derail) I disrecommend reading Discworld books.
This not because I classify them as "older"; by ignoring the classics of the genre as you do, you simply lack (or at least have huge gaps in) the common frame of reference. You'd miss so much gags, references and allusions that you might end up asking yourself why people think those books are funny at all.
|
That is true for the older Pratchet books and especialy for the Rincewind books. But Pratchet moved even in his older books away from beeing overly parodistic. So the Rincewind books would be no good recommendation, but something like "Going Postal" or "Klonk" is okay. And to fully understand the excellent witches books, you have to know fairy tales and Shakespeare not Howard or Leiber
I think nearly nobody gets all the references and jokes, how many depends on your knowledge of the referenced material, with is not just fantasy but science, classical literatur, philosophy, history and many more. So even if you lack in one area, there is plenty to be amused anyway. The special cases being books that focus on some source material, like Rincewind on classic Swords&Sorcery and slapstic-movies, the witches as above etc. But many of the references are so common in our culture that you would get even some of them without having read the original (anybody knows King Kong or Tarzan or Dracula, even without having read it or seen a movie)