Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Yes, I guess I assumed that was the case (if not directly the disease then the constraints of needing an assistant so on). Still, I'm not complaining. For all that I might say some books are not as good as others, I re-read the lot at irregular intervals and enjoy myself all the way ... I just like hearing his voice.
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By the end he could no longer type and had to rely on verbal dictation software, which really messed with his editing ability a lot. I believe the last two novels are the ones that were done totally by dictation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
But we have to remember, there are those who think some books in a series are standalone because they have a beginning, middle, and end. That does not make a book standalone. Standalone is when there is nothing that connects it to any other book in the series. a book like Guards! Guards! does have a connection to other book(s).
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Man, moving those goalposts all the time has got to to be tiring. Most readers that aren't trying to obessively argue for their viewpoint as the only legitimate viewpoint understand stand-alone novels to be novels that don't
require you to read other novels to get the full story. This is true of every single Discworld novel except the first two which are two parts of one story. If we took your argument seriously it would create some bizarre situations in other series. For example you now need to read all of the
Fleet of Worlds series of novels before you read the Ringworld novels, because they take place before them and make the Ringworld novels no longer stand-alone. Even though they were written decades after the first Ringworld novel and were co-written with a second author. It also means you have to read all the random
Known Space novels and short stories before you can read the Worlds books, because they take place before them as well. For added lunacy, that includes all the Man-Kzin Wars collections, which aren't even canonical but are part of the Known Space series. (Note that GoodReads doesn't list the Known Space novels chronologically.)
If you want to continue to try to make the argument that they're not stand-alone, then reading them in sub-series order is more proper because each sub-series builds from book to book. That means each sub-series should properly be read in total before attacking another sub-series, otherwise you don't get the full story for that sub-series and will miss out on all the character development between each novel in the sub-series. (Vimes' development and Moist von Lipwig's particularly stand out.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
That's the problem reading at random. You don't know what you are getting and what should have been read first.
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No one is suggesting reading them at random.
Everyone that's not recommending reading in publication order is suggesting reading them by collections of sub-series. Stop moving the damn goalposts every time your previous points get totally debunked.