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I had time to look at that flow chart a bit and I definitely think Guards, Guards is the best place to start (I got an essay below on the Watch and related Ankh-Morepork city arcs below, If you want). The Death books: don't think I read Mort (which I think is about someone who is Death's apprentice, and marks the shift as Death as a straight-up antagonist to a more sympathetic character), but again no duffers after that, even if Hogfather and Thief of Time are the better ones (and some of the series best; bit more on Death below). The Witches arc is, as I said, definitely the most consistent in terms not just of quality (all good; a few great including the best, as I remember) but also in terms of characters and setting (they're the rural, fairy tale-like, side of things; Ankh-Morepork, the world's largest city, is the setting of most of the other threads and they get blended up and criss-cross because of that). They again probably build to the final non-teen fiction one, Carpe Jugulum, being the best. The Watch books do get better (around the Fifth Elephant and Night Watch, maybe Thud! being the best ones) but I don't think there's a duffer in there. They later get mixed in with the "Industrial Revolution" ones which I wouldn't have first thought of as a discrete sub-series or arch; but thematically that makes sense (after I typed the stuff below it occurs to me that there is a literal if fictional industrial revolution, in the biggest city at least, of Discworld's previously generic-Middle-Ages-ish fantasy universe. Relatively late on in the series). Reading back and forth and dipping in and out like I did: they ("Industrial Revolution") are more like standalone novels where the Watch characters make sort of heavy cameos (or are involved as non-protagonists, maybe semi-antagonists - you get to see how some of the central figures look to others. The most central guy in the Watch, Vimes, in particular. The Patriarch of the city is all over both of those arcs in that respect, too I think). The "Industrial Revolution" books are more complicated, while being obviously direct parodies of real world historical/political topics (Making Money is literally about the generic-middle-ages-fantasy Discworld city printing cash, and from there modern monetary policy and political economy; Going Postal is actually about a postal service; and so on). The Watch is generally about social justice, inclusion, and progress in that. If you had to pick one theme (the first too are more like parodies of crime fiction and real world police; which again makes it hard to split out the Ankh-Morepork threads as discretely as the chart does). "Feet of Clay" is literally about getting a troll or golem into the watch. "Monstrous Regiment" is similarly about vampires and werewolves who drink only (bovine?) substitute-blood in. Obvious parallels with racism, homophobia etc. and the reversing of. But lighter, more optimistic Zootopia kind of world view... The Death books also read like stand-alones: definitely Thief of Time and I think the Hogfather, because he isn't a protagonist. They (definitely Thief of Time) have I'm pretty sure one-off protagonists, with sections from Death's POV (so a POV-character, in a Song of Ice and Fire-speak). Death turning up at some point is also the "they killed Kenny!" of Discworld. Cameo at minimum in every one, I think. The Rincewind ones, which started out as the centre, look like the weird black sheep sibling now the whole thing's done. The Last Continent (where he goes to a fictional Australia which is so heavy it stops the flat plant from tipping off the elephants' and Turtle's back. Ahem) is the only really good one, with Interesting Times being worth it. First couple are borderline guff, as you've discovered. Even Unseen Academicals (a football parody in Ankh-Morepork; again the parodies make it such as that I couldn't have thought of a flowchart like this. As a start), written after all the good stuff (but TBF, into his illness) I thought was a mixed bag and nothing special. The fact I read it years after my first (years' long) binge and at the tail end of dipping in now and again (and all his teen-fiction phase), I wondered whether he'd lost it, his illness had caused him to lose it, or it wasn't that good in the first place and I'd improved my taste. Its place in that chart does make me more confident in recommending the above as "great" and so on... ...and to make me want to read the science ones, at least. Oh, and the Ancient Civilisations odd couple are in the "worthwhile", though not "great" pile. Is what I thought when I read them.