tom hi've been listening to the first couple of discworld books on my runs this week. haven't revisited them since i was a teen. it's fun: i know later books are better and tbh i find pratchett more enjoyable in small doses these days but still going back the early ones is like rewatching the simpsons in adulthood: i reckon over half of the jokes must have gone over my head first time around
josef@tomharris as someone who basically never read discworld as a kid (like maybe i read 1.5 books total) a few years ago i tried this and really bounced off the audiobooks. the nigel planer ones. i think his voice was just too harsh somehow, like, grating almost. it wasnt what i was expecting at all. apparently theyre doing new audiobooks now so maybe i'll give those a go eventually
@jk i think the standard advice to start a few books in (Mort, or Guards! Guards!) is basically correct. The early ones are basically fantasy parody.
@jk nigel planer did voices for the discworld point & click computer games so they might have gotten him for some nostalgia
@jk pratchett is like the ur-signifier for the 90s edition of a very specific type of british man we've talked about before (other signifiers: bill bailey, hitchhikers, hobgoblin beer). like all nerds their worst vice is flogging a horse to death but i find them charming in small doses, probably because I was one, or at least adjacent. as nerds go it seems a much better way to be than the american kind who are high on self-congratulatory paul graham essays
@tomharris i think it's a grounded approach to fantasy from a particularly dreary british perspective. not top-down-epic but a patchwork of pub folktales about stone circles or aliens told partially in jest. and the specifics of worldbuilding originating from that kind of "but how do the trains work" pedantry, coupled with a shrugging acceptance that the trains actually do not work and never will. greebling through complaint
@tomharris like, whatever is missing in quality or inventiveness is compensated for by the unserious, low-key tone making it impossible to really feel like anything you're being told is particularly patronising. hence the soothing quality
@tomharris this is probably a contrast to various narrative podcasts i have heard from the US whose main impact on me was "this is really quite patronising and cringe"