Title: The Discworld Companion
Author: Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs
Category: Non-Fiction
Page Count: 288
Rating: 3/5
This book is basically a reference book that works a bit like a dictionary and which contains entries on most of the major places and characters of the early Discworld books. I say “early Discworld” because of the main flaw here, which is that this was published relatively early on into the series and so it’s by no means definitive. My edition only covers the books up to and including Soul Music.
You can figure out for yourself how much that means you’re missing.
Then there’s the fact that it’s a reference book, which makes it a pain to read, at least in the traditional sense. I personally wouldn’t consider it “read” until all of the definitions had been absorbed, and so it basically left me reading this as a bedtime book and working my way slowly through it just so that I could say that I read it.
With all of that said, it was still reasonably interesting, and a lot more fun than when I read the Oxford English Dictionary. With that said, I think the best parts of it were the introductory essays and the Terry Pratchett interview that was included at the end of it. That kind of means that the bulk of the book itself was the bit that I enjoyed the least.
Overall then, this is only really a book for die-hard Pratchett fans and completionists, and I only ticked it off reluctantly because it’s one of the few Pratchett books that I hadn’t read yet. It’s definitely not one to start out with though. So yeah, there’s that.
