The Colour of Magic
Ratings893
Average rating3.8
Rincewind is not having a good life. He flunked out as a wizard due to a bet, and now he is stuck playing tour guide to the first tourist on Discworld. Their antics are amusing at first but quickly lose their luster. Death is the best part of the book, but I was delighted to see THE END.
Originally posted at rebeccasreadingcorner.blog.
Eternally grateful that this book exists and launched my favorite fantasy series.
It is entertaining and worth it if you're familiar with a lot of standard fantasy tropes and want to have a laugh. I thought of it as a Hitchhiker's Guide for the fantasy set.
It is like a twisted game of D&D where the player characters don't know they are playing a game. It's really four novellas stuck together, telling the stories of Rincewind and his charge, Twoflower who are taking a tour around the Disc.
Twoflower is a clerk from “foreign parts,” desperately seeks to escape his office rut and have a little adventure in the metropolis of Ankh-Morpork, where the heroes and villains of his fantasies reside. Rincewind, would-be-wizard and academic failure of Unseen University, has to either keep Twoflower unharmed or incur the wrath of the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. Of course the journey with Twoflower might also kill him.
It's interesting to see the genesis of some characters/elements of the Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, Octarine, The Great A'tuin, Vetinari, Death and so on. Also the Luggage, who is a horrifying monster, yet practical carrying device, and frequent deus ex machina for the travelers.
If you want to read some Discworld, it's not necessary (or even recommended) to start with the Colour of Magic. Most readers suggest going for a subseries and reading from there. Guards! Guards! or Wyrd Sisters are a great introduction to the Nightwatch/Witches subseries respectively. These are where I started. The characters in those books have a little more depth to sink your teeth into and the humor gets better as well. But Colour of Magic is still a lot of fun.
been wanting to get into discworld ever since i read good omens for the first time like, a decade ago, and i'm so glad i did.
i really understand why people don't want newcomers to start with this one. i decided to because release order is the order any fan who has been into it since the beginning had to read it, and i wanted to experience the series that way, but it does just throw you right into the middle of wacky situations. confusing lingo, and a pretty wild format, but here's the thing - i LOVE that. i love sci-fi and and fantasy that has worldbuilding and characters and events solely for the sake of theme and tone, and this feels like peak that to me. i don't care if everything i'm reading can be neatly categorized and placed into an encyclopedia, just hit me with it! also don't make the characters act like they've never encountered normal things in their universe.
this first discworld book does neither of those things and i love it for that, and i'm very excited to keep reading them and get to the ones the fans consider better than this!
I am astonished that I took so long to allow Mr Pratchett into my life.
This was fantastic!!
My first Pratchett book. I started with this as an audiobook and then life got in the way and it kept getting auto-returned so I would splice in the ebook from time to time. By the end it probably ended up being about 50% read and 50% listened to. I enjoyed both. The narration was lovely for the audiobook, though a little swift. I found it easier to follow on 0.95 speed.
Being lots of little stories put together felt a little disjointed but I appreciated the world building, character development, and humour. I got a little lost at times but ploughed through and it didn't affect my enjoyment or understanding too much. Somewhere between 2 and 4 stars, a fine start to what I trust will be a fantastic series.
I feel like I spent so much of this book in a state of confusion, but I suppose that's to be expected out of the first book of a 40+ book series set in a universe where the characters live on a disc that sits on four elephants, which stand on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space.
Overall, it was pretty enjoyable. I may skip around in this series, as it is allowed.
Just an incredibly joyous read
I just loved the way this book was written. Terry Pratchett's way of writing was truly unique and you can see his personality shine through.
H built two characters who were very likeable and sent them on such an insane adventure in less than 300 words which is an incredible feat for sure. Books just aren't written like this anymore I feel.
I should have read a few reviews before I opened this one....Logically, you would think you should start with book 1 in a long series. I have a habit of accidentally picking up say book 4 in a series, liking it, and then having to go back and start at the beginning. So here I was thinking starting with book 1 was a good thing. Should have read the reviews because then I would have known NOT to start with book 1. Skip it. For now. Read a few others and then come back. Because this one? Was kinda boring. And it didn't do the best job at world building. There were characters that flit through a few pages and then disappear. I assume in a later book they'll be important but not this one. I did like the characters, (well most of them). Rincewind too a little bit to get used to and Twoflower seesawed back and forth between idiocy and haplessness. So I'm willing to try another Discworld book....I just need to read a few more reviews to figure out which one.
Even though I've known about Pratchett for years, I had never gotten around to reading any of his books until now and it was delightful. The quirky humour and impeccable writing doesn't sacrifice any of the wonder that I came to expect from a good fantasy, on the contrary.
This is my first Discworld novel, and indeed the first book I've read by Terry Pratchett. I have had my eye on the Long Earth series as well which I will hopefully get to one day.
I found the writing and plot of this book delightfully reminiscent of reading Hitchhiker's Guide. It was a light and witty book that I flew through. I found I enjoyed it even more than Hitchhiker's because it was set in a fantasy world which is something I'm more familiar with than scifi. It was such a peculiar and amazing feeling to be reading the description of the discworld for myself, as I only knew of it through hearing references and other people describe it.
Rincewind and Death are my two favourite characters from this book, and I genuinely can't wait to see who pops up in the next book.
I gave this only three stars because, while it's a great book, compared with what comes later it's nowhere near the heights the series reaches. If you're new to Discworld, I'd suggest not starting here (other reviewers offer their suggestions) but coming back to it later to see how it all started.
I reread it as I'm trying to reread the series in order, just as I did originally beginning in around 1990. I can't recommend the Discworld novels highly enough, even the least good (like this first entry) are very funny but the best are philosophical masterpieces and comically brilliant. The Colour of Magic suffers from trying to cram too many ideas into a short book - later efforts would have taken just one or two and developed them. It's also more a clear parody of a certain genre of novel, with gods and heroes at the periphery while minor-ish characters like Death would later go on to dominate.
Rereading it now, it feels odd that it was ever published but as you progress through the series you'll be glad it was.
I just do not like fantasy
So, I have given the fantasy genre a fair shot. I read Hitchhikers Guide, Narnia, and now this. I am just not an adventure gal, do not find the humor funny, and will be sticking to sci-fi.
I wanted to like this book. I wanted to like this series. As someone who loves Fantasy, the Discworld books are often recommended to me. While I love the idea of the world, the execution of character development and lore feels underdeveloped for me, at least in this novel. It's possible that I will read another Discworld book in the future, but I'm not hurrying off to do so.
Felt like a fantasy Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Some downright laugh out loud moments.
Se Supone que es uno de los mas flojitos del Mundodisco...muy entretenido y con partes que me hicieron reir...no me desalentó para el resto de la saga que pretendo seguir leyendo.
Being the first Discworld book, The Color of Magic is vastly different in many ways from the books that follow it. The characters of Rincewind and Twoflower are not as well defined as they would later become in the series and the Discworld itself is also still an idea in its infancy.
This doesn't mean that Sir Terry Pratchett's humor is any less hilarious though. The dialog is witty and filled with puns and innuendos that you might only catch on a second or third read-through, and the story is pretty well written from beginning to end.
Reading The Color of Magic after the passing of Sir Terry Pratchett really makes me both sad and happy, sad that such a wonderful writer and person passed away, and happy that he gave us one of the most enduring universes in all of literature.
Pratchett signature witty prose in its infancy. It introduces the Discworld, his famous fantasy world in the shape of a disc, hold by four elephants carried by a giant turtle that floats trough space. The coward and weakling Rincewind, a expelled magician who knows only one spell which he cannot ever cast, is charged to protected the incredibly naive and optimistic Twoflower, the Disc's first tourist visiting the world most vicious, dangerous and smelly city. The world is interesting, the prose kind of good but the story fails to keep you interested to read through.
Much as I love Terry Pratchett, this is definitely a case of him finding his feet. You can see all the elements that made some of the later books such classics, however there are also plot holes and a general scattershot feeling. This is a pity because people often feel they need to start at the beginning of the Discworld series and are put off by this lackluster start (although, when I originally read this in my early teens, I thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever read).
My advice: start with something like Wyrd Sisters, Mort or Small Gods and then leave this one for when you want to complete the set.