[Manabi]

Originally Posted by murg

Sorry to disagree with you monkey, but the correct way to read Discworld is backwards.

So, widdershins?

Originally Posted by ekbell

It would be nice to have a similar chart for the Disc World Series regardless of preferred reading order.

Not author-produced, but here's the one made by fans. That's missing two books:

• The Shepard's Crown, the final book he wrote. It goes after I Shall Wear Midnight, and should have a solid line connecting them.
• Raising Steam. It goes after Making Money, and should have a solid line connecting them.

The chart's easy to use, you pick a starting point (Rincewind/Death/The Watch/etc.) and read the books in order from left to right following the solid lines. The industrial revolution ones are only loosely connected until you get to Going Postal. That and the two following ones star Moist von Lipwig. The previous ones have different lead characters in each one.

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

I'd be happy if someone simply explained what they got out the Discworld series. I couldn't get past the first half of the 1st book (or was it the 6th?), and I was a lot less picky back then.

The first book is by far the worst one, so it's not a good introduction to the series. What I got out of it was how much fun it is. The stories are good, and there's a lot of humor. The world is really fun too, especially the parallels to the real world. (For example, eventually Discworld gets the clacks, a parallel to the Internet, only done with a network of semaphore towers. Technically it's closer to the telegraph, but the way it's used is closer to the Internet.)

Then as you read more of the books, you start getting more out of it by catching the cameos of characters from other books. (For example, the City Watch characters will show up in non-watch novels.) It's great how all of it builds on itself. Events in previous books are part of the world for all following books. While every novel is self-contained, the world is much, much richer if you've read the previous ones.