But I did get into Discworld on the ground floor. I got The Color of Magic, the very first book, in the mid-80s before the second book (The Light Fantastic) ever came out. It was a hardcover from the Columbia Science Fiction Book Club, and that's the dust jacket above. I think I got it on the strength of the catalog's description, where it was no doubt compared to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I'd loved. And it WAS a little like that, only with fantasy. And I loved the idea of a flat world sitting on top of four massive elephants, themselves resting on a gargantuan turtle, swimming through space. It evoked Ancient Egyptian and Indian ideas of the cosmos. The story itself was an amusing trifle, enough to get the second book, which was okay.
But with the third book, Equal Rites, the previous protagonists (a less-than-competent wizard and Discworld's first tourist) were jettisoned in favor of new characters, and though Pratchett would return to the book's witches fairly often, each Discworld novel from then on might focus on an entirely different corner of his universe and a new cast of characters. He kept it fresh, and I was soon grabbing the paperbacks before the book club could ever offer sturdier versions - no waiting!
Call it heresy if you will, but I thought Hitchhiker's got progressively less funny and interesting, whereas Discworld got better over time. I suppose I should count myself lucky that there's so much left for me to discover - some 30 books just in the Discworld series and several more besides. We would all have been luckier still to have kept Pratchett on Earth and in health for longer.
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When I had my extended stay in hospital about a decade ago I burned through a lot of Discworld audio books (read by Tony Robinson aka Baldrick) but these were abridged and didn't really do the stories justice.
Guess I need to conquer my obsession that giant works - like Sir Terry's 40-odd Discworld novels - have to be read in order.
I agree with you on Hitchhiker's. The books were pale imitations of the original radio series (I ignore the more recent efforts to revive the radio series as they're spun out of the later novels, which, as you rightly said, weren't much cop).
For me, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy will always be just the first two seasons of the radio show - from the '70s - and that is all. ;-)
Unfortunately I'm bad at reading in general. I'll have a book by the side of my bed, but I'll play video games/read a comic/refresh twitter over and over again rather than read an actual novel. I've had "Nightwatch" next to me bed for two (three?) years now. I did attempt to start reading it last night, but I got a bit too emotional and couldn't do it.
Pratchett does improve greatly as he goes, yes.
I read the early books more or less as they came out in the US, first as part of a general appetite for humorous fantasy in general (I read Anthony, of course, Asprin, and even Craig Shaw Gardner). I think it was Pyramids and Guards, Guards that moved him up to one of my favorite authors. Then I started going to SF conventions and discovered that the US publishers were holding back on us; I wound up bring home three new books from one of the dealers who did imports and generally kept ahead until he finally got a simultaneous release deal going.
Jeff: I could never get into the Dirk Gently books. I read them, but found them a little dull, to be honest. Probably a question of expectations, hoping for another Hitchhikers but getting a different animal altogether. Would probably like them more today than when I was a teenager. I, too, read a lot of comedy SF and fantasy, Asprin and Anthony among them. The latter's stuff was great fun and I read most of his series, but they feel juvenile today. I've grown up, I guess.
The further I went back, the less I found what it was that hooked me in the first place: the humanism, the city of Ankh-Morpork struggling to modernize, a strangely empathetic Death. I was surprised to read the Rincewind books, because when he had shown up in the other books, it was usually just as a cameo.
I haven't read the last couple books in the series yet. I suppose I will correct that now.