The Ossining Public Library

Terry Pratchett is that rare author who can make you laugh at the same time as he makes you think.

Extraordinarily prolific, he coauthored the cult classic, Good Omens, about — I kid you not — the Second Coming, and has produced on his own dozens of books in his Discworld series, both for adults and teens, although the teen books make wonderful adult reading too.

Discworld is an alternate universe where pocket watches are powered by tiny demons, the University Library is run by an orangutan and Death rides a horse named Binky. As the name implies, Discworld is flat, but the people who inhabit it are recognizable as round-Earth-like human beings with all their foibles and oddities — perhaps a wee bit exaggerated.

Pratchett also characters Earth itself with interesting characters. In his Bromeliad Trilogy, the heroes are four inch high people who live in the walls of a department store and hijack a truck.

If you read Pratchett only for his silly inventiveness, you will get your money's worth, but each Pratchett book also has a lot to say about subjects such as death, religion, love, kindness, war and the motion picture industry. So you can read his works on a philosophical level, if you can keep from chuckling.

One other quality that make Pratchett worth reading is his basic decency. Although his heroes are far from perfect, their hearts are in the right place. This makes his books a morally and emotionally satisfying read as well as an enjoyable one

Pratchett's books are, of course, available at OPL.

Enjoy!