Subject: That's a tough one.
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Posted on: 2019-09-17 13:29:00 UTC

I started reading Pratchett around the time of The Last Continient and Jingo, so I've got a strange thing where the stuff before that feels 'old', and stuff after a certain point feels like 'the new books'.

I think my favourite pair, and they are very close to back-to-back, are Thief of Time and Night Watch. Thief is nice because it's similar to the one-off stories like Pyramids and Moving Pictures, which I also like a lot, but is simultaneously a Death-Susan book, which are ostensibly my favourite.

As for Night Watch... I don't know, there's just something about it. Partly it's the way it lets us experience old, wild Ankh-Morpork again, after the series tamed it so thoroughly. And there's a feeling like the whole book is a well-oiled machine, with all the moving parts heading towards an inevitable conclusion.

I'll also throw an honourable mention to The Science of Discworld, which with its siblings is quite unfairly left out of the count of novels. All four of them, but particularly the first, carry on the Wizards' storyline, filling the long gap between Last Continent (#22) and Unseen Academicals (#37) that's otherwise only broken by The Last Hero. SciDisc 1 is also a fantastic tour through the history of our universe (whereas I feel like the science falls down somewhat in the other three, while simultaneously eating more and more of the book).

hS

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