✪ discworld | first read-through

the color of magic - ★★☆☆☆
the light fantastic - ★★☆☆☆
equal rites - ★★☆☆☆
mort - ★★★☆☆
sourcery -★★☆☆☆

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16.11.24 - let's finally talk sourcery! the book i started in early 2023 and the one that sent me to the reading block of the year. after a year and a half of not touching and dreading everything discworld, i decided i wanted to try it again. a lot of things came to this decision; audible, a room and bookshelf clean, guilt, but mostly this newfound need in me to start reading for the love of reading again, not just for the love of completing a tbr. (if you are here regularly, you might be familiar with my story. if not, it's right here. but the gist of it all was that i read books for the wrong reasons, and now i want to reignite my love for reading and discover who i am as a reader).

my main purpose for picking up sourcery again, was so that i could continue discworld in publishing order again. i jumped around the idea of restarting all over again, from book 1, seeing as i'd forgotten so much, but in the end, the early books turned to be too boring for me to want to go through those again. not when i knew better ones like small god were soon to come. i did end up restarting sourcery from where i'd left, and got back into the swing of things with the wizards and the sourceror, but soon enough i was reminded of why i'd dnfd the first time. specifically, it had to do with this paragraph where i literally stopped the book last time and never opened, simply because i found everything to be too dragged out and slow to get going.

i didn't love rincewind in this, neither did i love the introduction of the female character, and all the jokes about sex coming up now that she was here. i'm not a prude, just not a fan of this particular kind of humor. i admit i liked the inverted romance storyline, but i wasn't a fan of the ending where nijel got the girl so effortlessly. as for the emotional ending, i thought it was neat, but didn't quite strike me. however, definite reread for sure for next time. xoxoxo

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next read: wyrd sisters!

This one's a little difficult to rate. It's one of the slowest books I've read by Pratchett but also my favorite Rincewind book so far so I'm rounding up to three stars.

Sourcery is the third Rincewind book written by Terry Pratchett and probably one of the most magic/wizard based one. In Sourcery, a different type of magic starts causing outright chaos in Discworld and manages to threaten the very fabric of reality. While Rincewind is a particularly poor student of magic, the average wizard poses no more threat to a citizen of Ankh-Morpork or anywhere in Discworld than a crazy old uncle. It takes years of devoted learning and reading to create the more complex spells and these spells are used largely for aesthetic purposes rather than aggressive ones. All that changes with the birth of a sourcerer. This particular type of wizard is the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son (a wizard squared if you will). This is not a type of magic that Discworld has seen in generations and the last time sourcerers were active, it almost spelled the end of this crazy little world. When the sourcerer arrives at Unseen University, it starts a chain of events that will lead to Rincewind and some new companions facing the end of the world and a power that they have next to know chance to control.

This book is a bit difficult to recommend just because the pace is so uneven. There will be long, slow stretches which then suddenly become full of action and humor and then slow again. I think it's probably my favorite Rincewind story so far, just based on how he deals with some of the humorous plays on stereotypical fantasy characters (like the daughter of Conan the Barbarian who just wants to be a hairdresser and keeps getting dragged into adventures due to undeniable barbarian impulses and the kid who's spent his life training to be an adventurer and has firm ideas about how adventurers act) and his interactions with Coin, the sourcerer, are particularly compelling. It's strange to see Rincewind trying to advise someone whose power is so insanely above his own. And yet it works. It's just very uneven pacing.

Sourcery is one of those stories that I'd recommend if you don't mind slow stretches with more character interaction than humor or action and want to see more of Rincewind interacting with similarly entertaining characters.