Starting book: The Colour of Magic
What’s to love: disaster wizards; a magical university with terrible administration; an orangutan librarian who only cares about books and bananas; plots that feel like a rollicking D&D campaign
Okay, okay. I know I just said don’t start with The Colour of Magic, but if the Wizards series is really where you want to begin, that is completely fine. The Wizards series, for the most part, follows Rincewind, a ‘wizzard’ whose main skill is running away from his problems. In the first two books, he serves as a reluctant tour guide to the terminally cheerful Twoflower, Ankh-Morpork’s first ever tourist. But as the series progresses, a great deal of these stories simply consist of Rincewind attempting to wriggle his way out of other people’s problems. It’s just a shame he’s so good at solving them.
To some extent, we also follow the magical Unseen University’s senior staff – a bunch of incompetent yet somehow likeable wizards who are very silly and extremely hellbent on not getting any wizarding done. These characters often have cameo appearances in almost all of the different Discworld series.
