FOR I CAN SEE THE BALANCE AND YOU HAVE LEFT THE WORLD MUCH BETTER THAN YOU FOUND IT, AND IF YOU ASK ME, said Death, NOBODY COULD DO ANY BETTER THAN THAT…

And so it ends.

Tiffany Aching is back! Now she’s a full witch, out on her own.

Of course things are going to go wrong.

Magic was useful for everything. It just killed you. You should always think of it first. Then you should decide if a little dram of death was worth it.

Just whoa. This book got big. We see a lot more about the world and more about the powers that exist beneath the surface. The world is weird and complicated and everything we thought we knew… well, i9t’s mostly right. Just incomplete.

Onwards! This time around, Pendragon has come to the territory of Veelox, dealing with a virtual reality addiction crisis. It’s a topic that comes up over and over again in science fiction and even in real world media coverage, warning that as virtual reality gets better and better, it will be harder and harder for people to leave, leading to society decaying. Regardless of what you think about the idea of such a thing happening in the real world, it’s an interesting enough take to build the story on.

Characterwise, Aja is actually one of the more interesting travelers we’ve been introduced to. She’s so confident in herself at first that she nearly refuses Bobby’s help, but as could be expected, things go sideways. She seems to learn from her mistakes and finally admits that perhaps she can’t save the world all by herself.

The trouble is you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your mind.

Tiffany returns, this time slightly older and in just a bit more trouble than before. This time around, she accidentally danced with the Wintersmith (the very embodiment of winter) and, as one thing leads to another, the Wintersmith beings to fall in love, trying to become human along the way.

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

A Hat Full of Sky takes The Wee Free Men and grows from there, following Tiffany Aching as she actually starts to learn a bit more witching, while at the same time having to deal with some of the fall out from her actions in The Wee Free Men.

Open your eyes and then open your eyes again.

The Wee Free Men is a wonderful book. It’s the Witches again, done YA this time around. It follows the story of Tiffany Aching–young witch to be–as she begins to discovers her powers and finds that the world may be just a bit more complicated than she (or the adults around her) thinks it is.

The turtle moves.

Small Gods is a bit odd in the greater Discworld universe, being one of only a handful of one-off stories (Pyramids and Amazing Maurice are the other two if you count the Industrial Revolution subseries as a series) and being relatively early in the reading order. So with the exception of offhand references (such as to the Great God Om), it’s one of the books you could easily read anywhere in your reading order.

“You want to know why we’re the ones responsible?” Gunny asked.

I looked up into a pair of wise eyes that had seen far more than mine.

In Going Postal, Moist von Lipwig rebuilt the post office. In Making Money, he took on the banks. Now? Steam engines are coming to the Discworld!

On one hand, it’s interesting to see more and more technology come to the Discworld, especially watching it blend with the magic that’s already there. You have goblins running the clacks (telegraphs) and now the trains and a engine that might just be alive. On top of that, we’re dealing with some of the fall out of the recent (bookwise) war between the Trolls and the Dwarves.