Discworld #12 - Witches Abroad
This book blog started life on Cohost, and it was purely because I decided that I was going to read all of the Discworld novels in order. I made a good start at them but felt a little burned out after not enjoying Eric and Moving Pictures, and shortly after I read them I was hired to write two adventures for the Modphius Discworld roleplaying game. The result is that I reached something of a saturation point with Pratchett, and I haven't touched a Discworld novel in over a year. I figured I should fix that and get back to reading them occasionally, so today I sat down with Witches Abroad.
This is among the longer novels in the series (or at least among the longest that I've read so far). It's marked on my spreadsheet as one that I've previously read, and I know that as a kid I had it in a three-volume anthology edition alongside Equal Rites and Wyrd Sisters, but I established very early on that I haven't actually read this previously.
I don't tend to talk about numerical ratings on this blog (though I use them on Storygraph and Goodreads), but this feels like a good book to use to demonstrate my approach to ratings. I gave it a 2.5 out of 5 (or a 5 out of 10), which I think many people would see as a low rating but by which I mean "this was unremarkable but I enjoyed it". I didn't dislike Witches Abroad, but it's not one that I'll think about much now that I've finished it and it's difficult to point to any parts that I really loved. I would describe it as "aggressively okay", and I still feel like I'm waiting for Discworld to really hit its stride as a series (though it does feel like that moment is getting closer).
The idea that stories want to be told is one that's been touched on a few times already in this series, and I suspect it's likely something that we're going to come back to again in future books (we've already established in this read-through that Pratchett loved to revisit the same ideas and either try them again or else try them from a different angle). The fact that we've seen this theme before, combined with the fact that most of this novel is riffing on fairy tales we're expected to already be familiar with as readers, means that nothing in this book felt particularly new to me.
That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it. Nanny Ogg's letters home are fun, Greebo as a human is very entertaining, and seeing Granny Weatherwax exhibiting some actual power and manifesting herself as a force to be properly reckoned with felt like something we'd been building towards with this character for a couple of books. It was nice to see some new parts of the Disc, too, though I wish they felt a little more lived-in and real rather than a sort of generic fairy tale backdrop. Ankh-Morpork always feels thoroughly alive on the page, like it's a character in its own right, and as nice as it was to get away from the city for a book, I missed that sense of very real geography that's one of the biggest strengths of Pratchett's writing.
The upside is that, after a year and change away from the series, Witches Abroad made me want to read another Discworld book sooner rather than later, and we'll count that as a win.