The most recommended Discworld books

From the moment I first read a Discworld novel, I was hooked by the unique and whimsical twist, given by Terry Pratchett, to the situations his characters find themselves in. His clever use of humor allows him to entertain his readers while making complex financial concepts accessible to readers of all backgrounds. This use of humor and the underlying message that finance is as much about human nature as it is about numbers underpins my teaching and writing.

He highlights the quirks and motivations of bankers and entrepreneurs which I recognised from my time in the industry. But importantly he highlights the personal transformation and ethical dilemmas a quest for wealth can bring. For me, this resulted in really considering the true meaning of success.

That said he doesn’t shy away from addressing economic disparities. But overall, when I read this I was given a chance to view the finance… show more.

I’m going to end on a happy note with Going Postal. This book is part of Terry Pratchett’s expansive Discworld series, but can be read standalone and actually served as my entry point.

Moist Von Lipwig (gross name to read, but appropriate) is a con man that tries so hard to do the wrong thing, and yet inevitably ends up an accidental hero. Pratchett twists common tropes by making the main character the hero to everyone but himself. Moist sees himself as being purely self-serving, which makes it that much more delightful when he ends up helping others. 

Pratchett’s humor and biting wit about the ails of modern society are on full display and had me laughing aloud through much of this story. It’s endearing, upbeat, and filled to the brim with sarcastic charm. In other words, my kind of book.

I fell in love with how absurd the books are in their brilliance and how they seem to evolve together with the reader.

When reading them as a young adult, I found them funny, creative, and quirky, yet with progressing education and experience, re-reading them reveals Pratchett’s philosophical genius with the many things that are hidden in the plots and many details. Only after reading them the third time did I notice how a simple and impressive description of string theory shaped the plot. After finishing my master's in business psychology, I recognized several behavioral patterns from my lectures and reading materials.

What still impresses me most about it is that not realizing the hidden treasures in the stories still makes it possible to follow them without feeling stupid or as though something is missing.

Wyrd Sisters is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.

It is unapologetically satirical and seizes upon a well-fleshed-out genre and turns it upon its head, making every last detail into a caricature that somehow creates more interesting, realistic characters than fantasy ever could.

His witches aren’t really mystical but don’t mistake that for lacking power. They’re more like indomitable grandmothers you don’t dare cross.

This book has everything from ghosts to prophecies to bastard sons and lost heirs of the kingdom. Nothing turns out the way you’d expect.

Terry Pratchett’s genius includes an anthropomorphized thunderstorm waiting in the wings after appearing briefly in the opening scenes, only to surprise you with a grand performance in the final act, just when you’d thought it was a very random start to a topsy-turvy story. I’ve never laughed so much!

I’m cheating here. I actually started with The Colour of Magic and kept reading all 41 Discworld books. While The Colour of Magic is brilliant alone, it’s even better as the launching point for the most fantastic, absurd, ridiculous adventures, served with a side of insightful social commentary.  If there had been another hundred books, I would have just kept reading.

In this first book, we meet Rincewind, who is fleeing practically everything, followed by a walking wooden box known as Luggage. Rincewind is an utter failure as a wizard, and his only talent is running away. He survives, hilariously, on luck alone.

I lost a lot of sleep while reading this and the subsequent books because I kept forgetting that I had to stop reading and go to sleep.

This is the second book in the Guards sequence, but it’s easy enough to start here. This detective story set in the sprawling, smelly metropolis of Ankh-Morpork, featuring dwarves, werewolves, and (occasionally) humans, is a laugh-out-loud and anarchic book, managing to be hugely joyous and page-turningly compelling at the same time. Insanely silly and utterly real, with characters so solid you can see (or in some cases, smell) them long after you turn the last page.

We all know what happens when Death takes a holiday, but what happens when Death is given notice? 

Dismissed from the only job he’s ever known, Death must decide how to spend the time he has left. Taking on the random name “Bill Door,” he offers his talents scything hay, “one blade at a time, one time, one blade.” Death is a recurring character in Discworld and has the casually brutal forbearance of someone who has seen it all.

Seen, but not experienced and it is the dawning comprehension that I love most about Reaper Man: “[Death] wondered if he’d ever felt wind and sunlight before. Yes, he’d felt them, he must have done. But he’d never experienced them like this; the way wind pushed at you, the way the sun made you hot. The way you could feel Time passing. Carrying you with it.”

I said I would limit myself to two Discworld books, so here we have my other favourite. This is quite an early one, before the world is fully formed, but the portrayal of the wizards and their University is beginning to emerge, full of chaos and joy and demented energy. But again, this madcap, surreal mania is corralled masterfully, the characters feeling like real people with real agency, moving through a world that—while full of vivid colours and impossible, surreal things—is also somehow solid and real. It is a testament to Pratchett’s incredible storytelling powers that Ankh Morpork is more real to me than several cities I have actually, physically visited. It is unreal and yet hyper-real at the same time. You should go visit. It is wonderful. 

This book and the others, including The Globe, Darwin’s Watch, and Judgement Day, are wonderful in their mix of fantasy – Pratchett’s Discworld Wizards mixing it up in their quest to understand the “Round World” they accidentally created – and real science introduced and explained by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. The fantasy and the science are seamlessly interwoven in a way that make some complex subjects not just understandable but very readable. Like the explanation of exploring particle physics in the Large Hadron Collider by comparing it to a race that has never seen a piano, cannot see the piano, and try to determine its function and properties by hitting it and eventually pushing it out of a window five stories up and then naming the sounds it makes on hitting the ground…

Oh God, how I love Terry Pratchett. Lots of people think they can write comedy. Very few actually manage, much less manage to write it well.

I came to Pratchett only very recently, and I am reading his books very slowly, because he is no longer with us, and once I read the last one, there will be no more new books by him for me, and I will cry. The book takes its name from a horribly misogynistic tract by the religious leader John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, and pretty much eviscerates said tract in the first chapter.

Don’t worry if you never read anything by Pratchett before this; although it does (presumably) take place in his Discworld ‘verse, there is nothing you need to know beforehand, and it’s quite standalone. Pratchett is well known for taking fantasy tropes and… show more.