One of the major things that makes Terry Pratchett such a pleasure to read is his playfulness with fantasy tropes. The character who aspires to be a stereotypical barbarian is just a waif and grocer's son. The daughter of the greatest barbarian ever aspires to be a hairdresser though blood lust pounds through her veins whenever men and sharp things share proximity. Wizards roost when they've beaten some lesser mage, building a tower to fortify themselves.
Even if you haven't widely read the fantasy genre and aren't intimately familiar with its tropes, he inverts and alters them enough that it's possible to work backwards to them. In that way, Pratchett does the fantasy genre a great service, and manages to entertain while being a kind of inside out Coles Notes for an entire sort of literature.
But, as fun as his books can be to read, it seems that his plots suffered a bit in his earlier books. Maybe it isn't portrayed grandly enough - the failure to make epic an inevitable mage war being yet another of his inversions - but the story of Sourcery just doesn't hum or glow. It's as though fantasy is simply Pratchett's chosen vehicle for some teasing criticism of a literary genre and nothing more. He hits the necessary notes, and includes the essential movements, but as a whole Sourcery just doesn't feel fantasy-like enough.
Yet.
With another 1/5 of the book to go, there could be an upset, but as I remember this lingering feeling that the fantasy elements of Pratchett's work were merely a vessel being what cooled my enthusiasm for him years ago, I'm about as optimistic as a plastic bottle is likely to shatter.
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