The Definitive Ranking of Every Discworld Book

September 26, 2026

In the summer of 2026 I was winding down the research part of a completely different project, for which I had been reading nothing but non-fiction the previous seven years. I felt it was time to read something entirely fictitious for a change. One day in a used bookstore I came across Guards! Guards! and was hooked. I'm the type of person that when I get hooked on a thing I tend to make spreadsheets about it. With the Discworld^[1] the thing I wanted to make a spreadsheet about was which books were the best.

What makes this The Definitive Ranking of Every Discworld Book anyway? Great question! Other people call their rankings Definitive, but they are being cute, this ranking is actually Definitive. You see, this ranking was created using the magic of aggregation. It's not a single person's ranking, it is an average of many rankings. This is the same basic technique all the cool stats wizards use these days for sports and politics, so why not apply it to the Discworld as well? And unlike all of the other people who call their rankings Definitive, my opinions played no role in the creation of this ranking, it is aggregated entirely from other people's rankings.

The process of creating The Definitive Ranking of Every Discworld Book started with compiling all the rankings I cold find, but within certain parameters. I limited my search to rankings published as posts on websites, under a person's byline, and bypassed rankings posted on places like reddit. I was able to find six complete (or almost complete, more on that below) rankings that fit the criteria, as well as a crowd sourced ranking from Goodreads.^[2] That is the data that The Definitive Ranking of Every Discworld Book consists of, as more data comes to light more editions of this ranking may be released. With the seven rankings in a spreadsheet, an average was taken of the rankings for each book. The books were than sorted by their average ranking, and that is how The Definitive Ranking of Every Discworld Book was created.

For any of the individual rankings used in The Definitive Ranking of Every Discworld Book, one will find quirks and biases unique to that ranking. The magic happens when you use maths and average them all together. Doing this the individual biases of each ranking have less influence, the quirkiness of each individual author is largely blunted, and the resulting ranking can truly be termed The Definitive Ranking of Every Discworld Book.

It's also possible that in calling this ranking The Definitive Ranking of Every Discworld Book I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek. Even though this ranking is no doubt more Definitive than any single ranking on its own, what are the chances that this ranking is actually Definitive? Probably about a million to one.

The first column of the ranking table, "Rank," is the actual rank of the book in the ranking. The "Title" is the title of the book and the "Year," the year it was published. The "#" category, is the number of the book in publication order. The "Sub-series" is the Sub-series that the book belongs to, using the Sub-series defined by the publisher.^[3] The last column, "Ave," is the average of all the rankings for that book.

Rank	Title	Year	#	Sub-series	Ave
1	Night Watch	2002	29	City Watch	3.3
2	Men at Arms	1993	15	City Watch	8.7
3	Small Gods	1992	13	Standalone	9.3
4	Going Postal	2004	33	Moist von Lipwig	9.6
5	Guards! Guards!	1989	8	City Watch	10.6
6	Witches Abroad	1991	12	Witches	11.4
7	Wyrd Sisters	1988	6	Witches	11.6
8	Hogfather	1996	20	Death	13.0
9	Mort	1987	4	Death	14.1
9	Lords and Ladies	1992	14	Witches	14.1
11	Feet of Clay	1996	19	City Watch	14.3
12	The Truth	2000	25	Standalone	15.1
13	Monstrous Regiment	2003	31	Standalone	15.9
14	Reaper Man	1991	11	Death	16.4
14	Carpe Jugulum	1998	23	Witches	16.4
16	Thief of Time	2001	26	Death	17.9
17	A Hat Full of Sky	2004	32	Tiffany Aching	18.1
18	Maskerade	1995	18	Witches	18.3
18	The Fifth Elephant	1999	24	City Watch	18.3
20	The Wee Free Men	2003	30	Tiffany Aching	18.6
21	Wintersmith	2006	35	Tiffany Aching	21.0
22	Thud!	2005	34	City Watch	21.3
23	Equal Rites	1987	3	Witches	22.1
24	Moving Pictures	1990	10	Standalone	22.9
25	Pyramids	1989	7	Standalone	23.6
26	Making Money	2007	36	Moist von Lipwig	24.1
27	Jingo	1997	21	City Watch	24.3
28	The Last Hero	2001	27	Wizards	25.1
29	I Shall Wear Midnight	2010	38	Tiffany Aching	25.4
30	The Shepherd's Crown	2015	41	Tiffany Aching	25.6
31	The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents	2001	28	Standalone	26.3
32	Soul Music	1994	16	Death	27.6
33	The Colour of Magic	1983	1	Wizards	28.4
34	Eric	1990	9	Wizards	31.0
35	Interesting Times	1994	17	Wizards	31.3
36	Snuff	2011	39	City Watch	31.9
37	The Light Fantastic	1986	2	Wizards	32.9
38	Sourcery	1988	5	Wizards	33.9
39	Unseen Academicals	2009	37	Wizards	34.0
39	Raising Steam	2013	40	Moist von Lipwig	34.0
41	The Last Continent	1998	22	Wizards	35.0

Additionally, the averages of all the books in each of the various Discworld Sub-series were calculated, those are presented in the table below.

Sub-series	Ave
Witches	15.7
City Watch	16.6
Death	17.8
Standalone	18.8
Moist von Lipwig	22.6
Tiffany Aching	21.7
Wizards	31.4

A few miscellaneous observations about The Definitive Ranking of Every Discworld Book:

There's very little disagreement about which book is the best, with Night Watch coming first in four of the seven rankings, and placing no lower than 10th.
The Last Continent is last on The Definitive Ranking of Every Discworld Book, yet it is not last on any of the individual rankings, bottoming out at #38. It ends up last not because it placed last on the most rankings, but rather, it had no advocates. Some rankings placed some books last, and others placed that same book much higher because the ranking author liked something about it, whereas with The Last Continent everyone put it towards the bottom. This is the advantage of using an aggregated list: it captures multiple views in one ranking.
Books #11 (Reaper Man) to #20 (Hogfather) in publication order contain five of the top ten books in The Definitive Ranking of Every Discworld Book, as well as another three that are in the top 20. Everyone agrees that this is Peak Discworld.
Everyone hates^[4] the Wizards books. All but one of them are in the bottom 10, and the highest ranked (The Last Hero) only rises to #28. The average ranking for the series as a whole is a dismal 31.4, putting the average Wizard book in the bottom quarter of the rankings.
While the City Watch Sub-series lands three books in the top five (Night Watch, Men at Arms, and Guards! Guards!), the Witches Sub-series actually has the better overall series ranking average, 15.7 to 16.6.
Two of the rankings included were published right around the time that The Shepherd's Crown, the last Discworld book, was published. Those two rankings do not include The Shepherd's Crown.

The Discworld is a flat and circular world, with a ten mile high spire-like mountain jutting out of the center, and an encircling sea that waterfalls off the edge of the world into space. It rests on the backs of four gigantic elephants, who in turn stand on the shell of an even more enormous turtle, A’Tuin. It's also a fictional universe created by Terry Pratchett, spanning 41 books and numerous short stories. ↩︎
The seven rankings used were: a crowd sourced ranking from Goodreads, and rankings published in Cultured Vultures, Pratchett Job, Den of Geek, Shots Mag, Left Inside, and Metro UK. ↩︎
https://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/book-series/discworld/ ↩︎
In pretty much every ranking there is wording about how even the worst Discworld books are still good, so the word "hate" is being used rather flippantly here. A better description would be "merely good," instead of "very good" or "transcendentally great." ↩︎

Tags: discworld, spreadsheets

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