I just finished re-reading Wyrd Sisters, which is the 6th Discworld book and the second to feature the Witches of Lancre. This wasn't the first Discworld book I ever read, but it's the one that made the most impact in my early explorations of this universe that Sir Terry Pratchett had created.
It's easy to celebrate Pratchett's later books, because his writing just got better and better over the years. There may have been a lot more whimsy in the early Discworld books, but as you work through the novels, you find that he wove in more commentary on things like governments and society at large in a manner that was almost poetic and never felt heavy-handed, even if in some cases it totally was.
I feel like when he started writing stories about the witches, he started to bring in subtle commentary about things. The Rincewind books were largely silly and had occasional asides that were snarky but not very pointed. But even looking at the first book about Granny Weatherwax, Equal Rites, you can see the title alone already made it clear he wanted to say something more. That book had a lot of repeated discussions about what was proper for a man or a woman, even if that discussion was largely defined by how only the former can be wizards and the latter are meant to be witches.
Wyrd Sisters, on the surface, feels like a bit of a celebration of various Shakespearean works, given how he mixed elements from plays like Hamlet and Macbeth into one rather meta story. But at the same time, he added in a lot of bits about the power of words, how falsehoods presented as truth could become facts, and a lot of ideas about how a country should be ruled. Spoiler alert - it's not supposed to be tied to or influenced by magic. How's that for a story about witches, yeah?
It's nice to be back in Discworld. It's a very clever place that always feels like home in its own way. Perhaps a lot more than Xanth ever did for me.
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