Kid applicable

[Amor de Cosmos]

Question. Would Terry Pratchett's books be meaningful/interesting/comprehensible to an very articulate 11 year-old? I've never read any of them so have no opinion.

[Etienne]

Yeah, I think so. S/he'd be at the young end of the readership (13-15 is probably the usual time to start reading him) but the stories are easily comprehensible if not all the references are.

[caja-dglh]

My four year old though St Patrick's Day was St Pratchett's Day.

As Ettiene suggests it probably should work, particularly if they are interested in more Fantasy style stuff. I remember really liking Mort but never getting into the more "series" like books from Disc World. Which kind of resonates with me now and my patience for multiple seasons of a TV show being near zero.

[Levin]

Didn't he write some younger reader books? Or is the reader too old for them?

[Amor de Cosmos]

Didn't he write some younger reader books? Or is the reader too old for them?

We've been unpacking boxes that have been sitting in the garage for a year or more (La Signora's stuff from the UK) and a dozen or so Pratchett books are among them. She used them as a teaching aide for teenage boys with learning issues. Basically we're trying to figure out whether her grandson (twelve in August) would be ready for them, or whether they should find another home.

[delicatemoth]

I'm sure they'd be fine, that's about how old I was when I started reading them. If you already have them then just bung him one and see, as they don't have any horribleness in them. In particular, Pratchett was a pretty pro-woman author (he loved ripping the piss out of sexist fantasy tropes). I stopped reading after 7 or 8, but out of those I'd particularly recommend Equal Rites (witches have to save the arses of condescending wizards) and Mort (the story of Death's apprentice).

[lambers]

I started reading Discworld aged about 13 and never looked back... unless you count all the re-reading. Upon re-reading I realised there were a lot of references I didn't get originally, and there's probably even more that are still flying above my head, but that didn't detract from my enjoyment.

There are a lot of books which could be a good jumping in point, and could even be pitched towards the current interests of the kid: Equal Rites is strongly feminist (as mentioned above); Pyramids has many Egypt motifs; Moving Pictures uses film; Wyrd Sisters parodies Shakespeare; Mort twists a lot of fairy-tale tropes and is considered by most to be the best starting book, but most of the first 10 books are stand-alone and could be a starting point, the only ones from them I'd say to avoid starting with are all pretty sequelly – The Light Fantastic, Sourcery and Eric

If you do go the 'younger reader' route, that's the TIffany Aching series (starts with Wee Free Men) which is more simplistic than the main series (especially at the start), but I still enjoyed them when I first read them in my mid-20s.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Thanks everyone. Mort's one of the books in the collection so I think we'll take DM's advice, send it along and see how it goes down. Cheers.

[Jon]

There's one called something like the amazing maurice and his educated rodents which, coincidentally, my ten year old son has just finished reading this evening. He is running out of reading material with school and the library closed but i managed to find this book, which he'd actually started about a year or so ago. I haven't read it but it is, like the wee free men that lambers mentions, for a slightly younger audience. Plus it won the carnegie medal so it's also got that going for it.

[Various Artist]

Just in case you start casting around to find what else is out there for younger readers in Pratchett's oeuvre, I started with his wonderful children's book Truckers when I was 11 or 12. It's the saga of a tribe of inch-high Nomes (as in gnomes) whose life out in the wild becomes untenable and so travel to a human department store and join the nome society living under its floorboards... who previously thought the outside world didn't exist.

It forms the first third of a fantastic trilogy (Truckers, Diggers, Wings), a.k.a. The Bromeliad, which is extremely enjoyable – and like so much Pratchett is funny, deep and wise and so works on different layers depending on the age of the reader, as lambers alludes to above.

That was my 'gateway drug' to his writing, and since my dad had already got a handful of Discworld books at the time I very swiftly moved onto those and spent my entire teens devouring them. A "very articulate 11-year-old" should go gaga for him.

There's another early kids' series, the Johnny Maxwell trilogy: Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny and the Dead, and Johnny and the Bomb, which are each much more standalone though share the same protagonist. The former in particular is dated in one key respect – as it revolves around computer gaming of a certain era – but a really great fun read: it's about what happens when young Johnny is playing his favourite shoot-'em-up alien invasion game, and one day the aliens... surrender. To paraphrase what I recall the blurb saying, it's one thing trying to Save Mankind from the Alien Hordes, it's quite another trying to Save the Alien Hordes from Mankind. It's still a great story and and one's mental pictures can be easily enough 'updated' to more modern gaming by and large as the tropes basically still hold intact.

[pebblethefish]

Forget 11 year olds - the Truckers trilogy was great when I was in my twenties! I wish I'd discovered Pratchett when I was his age, so definitely give them a chance.

[Patrick Thistle]

I started reading Pratchett in my early teens. I was a precocious reader and I lived them. I'd always suggest starting with the first 2 as they set the scene for how the Discworld works and then read Mort, which stands up as one of the best.

For younger readers the Truckers trilogy is great, I got a bit tired of the Wee Free Men, I've read Johnny and the Bomb, which had one memorable laugh out loud moment, and The Amazing Maurice was good as well.

[Balderdasha]

I started reading Pratchett younger than 11. I think I started on the truckers, diggers, wings, trilogy (which is not actually as good as discworld) and then I found a seam of Terry Pratchett books in the library of the new school I went to when I was 11. I read about one a month or two, alternating with Agatha Christie.

[Balderdasha]

I've now read virtually everything Terry Pratchett has ever written. I've got a couple left in my wardrobe (don't have a proper bookshelf for adult books currently), Dodger and Nation, but I've really struggled to have the concentration level needed to read a full novel since having children.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Thanks all for advice and suggestions. Truckers and Mort have been duly dispatched and we await feedback.

[Guy Profumo]

I started reading Discworld aged about 13 and never looked back... unless you count all the re-reading. Upon re-reading I realised there were a lot of references I didn't get originally, and there's probably even more that are still flying above my head, but that didn't detract from my enjoyment.

There are a lot of books which could be a good jumping in point, and could even be pitched towards the current interests of the kid: Equal Rites is strongly feminist (as mentioned above); Pyramids has many Egypt motifs; Moving Pictures uses film; Witches Abroad parodies Shakespeare; Mort twists a lot of fairy-tale tropes and is considered by most to be the best starting book, but most of the first 10 books are stand-alone and could be a starting point, the only ones from them I'd say to avoid starting with are all pretty sequelly – The Light Fantastic, Sourcery and Eric

If you do go the 'younger reader' route, that's the TIffany Aching series (starts with Wee Free Men) which is more simplistic than the main series (especially at the start), but I still enjoyed them when I first read them in my mid-20s.

Witches Abroad parodies Cinderella, the Frog Prince, and the Wizard of Oz.

It's Wyrd Sisters that parodies Shakespeare.

[lambers]

Very true, mental mistake by me there, getting my Witches books mixed up. I'll edit my original post in case any future person is looking for advice.