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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote

Currently in the challenge: Martin Amis | Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Philip K Dick | Daphne Du Maurier | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse

Finished: Christopher Buckley | Shirley Jackson

I recently had the opportunity to download all 41 of the "Discworld" novels British humorist Terry Pratchett wrote between 1981 and his death in 2015; so I decided to go ahead and read at least the first couple, despite not being much of a fan of the fantasy genre, simply because this series' fans are so passionate and voracious in their fandom. But lo and behold, I was so blown away by his debut title The Colour of Money, I've decided to go ahead and commit to the entire 41-book run, and so have officially added Pratchett to my never-ending Great Completist Challenge.

The key to this being so incredibly entertaining is stated by Pratchett himself right in the very first chapter -- that fantasy stories by their very nature are so ridiculous and nonsensical, the best way to approach them is to just embrace the ridiculousness wholeheartedly, and to play up the absurdist elements of the genre while completely ignoring even the tiniest nods to reality found in most other fantasy novels. This results in the book being a pretty even conglomeration of the "Lord of the Rings" books, the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" books, and the films of Monty Python (all of which, it's worth noting, were hugely popular in the early-'80s years when Pratchett was writing the first "Discworld" novels), a healthy mix of High Fantasy tropes with silly jokes, sly references to other literary projects, and left turns into such unexpected territories that it will make you sometimes jump to your feet and cheer in public from the sheer cleverness of it all.

By definition, the plotline of The Colour of Magic is difficult to sum up quickly; better perhaps to think of this as mainly devoted simply to taking a look at the various bizarre corners of this wholly non-realizable planet (which, for those who don't know, is infamously flat and rests on the shoulders of four elephants, who in turn ride on top of a planet-sized turtle who is slowly paddling its way across the universe, its gender being a source of great contention among the planet's competing religions). Within this insanity, we follow The World's Worst Hero as he is conscripted to be a tour guide for a traveller from a country that is famously insular (and famously rich); this gives Pratchett an excuse to jump willy-nilly from one outrageous environment to the next, as the duo stumble in and out of the clutches of simpleton barbarians, crooked pub owners, assassin guilds, magical orders, riders of semi-invisible dragons, watery guardians of this flat world's circular edge, and way, way more, the story jumping randomly from milieu to milieu and even (thanks to some quantum physics) hopping into a Scandinavian jetliner from our own world for about twenty minutes.

If this already sounds like too much for you, you should steer well away from this book series altogether, because it just gets sillier from here; but if you've ever spent a Saturday night getting drunk and yelling "NI! NI! NI!" at your friends ("I demand....a shrubbery!!!"), this will be right up your alley, especially if you caught Amazon's recent adaptation of Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens and thought, "This is fine and all, but couldn't it have been a little crazier?" If that's the case, then "Discworld" is the answer to your prayers, which despite the niche appeal has somehow managed to sell over 80 million copies worldwide, making Pratchett the UK's biggest selling author of the entire 1990s. I'm looking forward to finishing the entire run over the next decade, and of course sharing my thoughts of them all with you here.