Finished
The Light Fantastic. That was...pretty good. The first third or even half suffers from a similar problem with the back half of Colour of Magic in that it starts out with all these vignettes jumping from scene to scene and while some bits are good like the talking trees, a lot of it are just kind of eh (gingerbread house, druids) and the continuity doesn't flow that well making it hard to stay engaged when the scenes keep changing every few minutes.
But once the party with Cohen gets together and it's basically a single PoV narrative for the entire back half...it reads well and is a lot of fun and I'd say it's a better story than Mort. The luggage is the MVP best character for sure. Death & Luggage are my two favorite discworld characters at this point.
I thought the very end was a slight dip down in that Rincewind who is a total coward irritable person the whole two books suddenly becomes like a hero and wins a fight and says a bunch of hero stuff in the finale which felt out of character. Mort had the same issue where Mort was a weird autistic kid but then becomes a total out of character protagonist for the finale in the final fight. I feel like Pratchett, at least in these early books (I can't remember how Men at Arms ended), had some difficulty balancing his non-traditional goofy characters while also trying to have more traditional "hero fights at the end and wins and is a cool winner" fantasy tropes because it just feels like the characters suddenly become out of character in these finales. These uncool but enjoyable characters shouldn't be cool in the end, they should just win in an uncool and in character way.
Otherwise the back half was great. Overall it's a good book and 200% improvement over book #1.
Will be interesting to see what book #3 Equal Rites is like. At this point I've read at least one book from each the main discworld sub-series except the witches. I don't know anything about them since they haven't really appeared in the other books I've read. Going in blind here. Going to read that next and then will take a discworld break since I'll be done with #1-#4 before I read #5 Sourcery at some point in the future.
I flipped through The Light Fantastic and the longest without the asterisks is the final chapter at 70 pages. Second longest is like 40 pages and most of em are like 15 to 20 pages. Maybe you're reading a digital copy that got rid of a bunch of them?
Yeah, I noticed them when I started looking, though what a chapter signifies vs just a paragraph break in this book, who knows.
