Discworld Read-through #1: The Colour of Magic
I decided early in 2024 to read all of the Discworld books in order, and for some reason I also decided to blog my way through them. I've read about half of the 41 books previously. I'll be tagging these posts with #discworld, so you can find them all there.
It's been maybe 20 years since I read this book, and I didn't remember very much of it at all. My clearest memory of it is of the ending, which is unsurprising as that's definitely the best part of the book.
People often say that The Colour Of Magic and The Light Fantastic are rough and that Pratchett hadn't quite found his voice or figured out what Discworld is yet, and that's definitely the case. There are some glimpses of what the books would become - particularly in the opening section, which has got the tone and wry humour of many of the later books. Overall it's pretty rough, though.
It's interesting how much this feels like a collection of short stories/novellas rather than a cohesive novel. That's often the case with older fantasy novels because they are, in fact, collections of short stories that were previously published in magazines, which isn't the case here. Given that we've got sections that pay homage to and/or satirise Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories as well as the Conan stories it's highly likely that that was a deliberate choice on Pratchett's part, but it means that the book doesn't really hang together very well. It's much more of a picaresque than a traditional novel.
A couple of minor quibbles. The first is that there's a lot of repetition. The example that comes to mind most is that each section feels the need to remind us what octarine is. The second (and this really is minor) is that Pratchett seems to forget after the first section is complete that Twoflower doesn't speak the same language as anyone else. Maybe he felt that the joke wore thin and discarded it, but it's strange to go from the man reading out of a travel dictionary to suddenly conversing perfectly fluently with everyone.
It's a fun, quick read, but I think the common advice to new Discworld readers to skip it initially is pretty solid.