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what I'm reading that you might want to read

For a while after becoming aware of the existence of Terry Pratchett I declined to read any of his books. I knew that they were British, humorous, and of the fantasy genre (loosely defined), a set of qualities that marked them in my mind as irredeemably dorky. It's not that I had any pretensions to non-dorkdom myself, of course; rather that, knowing my own lack of cool, I didn't want to risk associating myself with anything that would make that lack any more stark. Now that I'm grown up and not cool by definition that fear is gone, and I can confidently say that I've enjoyed almost every book that Mr. Pratchett has written.

Let this post count as a recommendation, if you're in the market for some clever writing. Pratchett writes books that are fairly funny, but they're not broad comedies; in all but his earliest books the humor spices up well-plotted stories that often also touch on mildly interesting questions about human nature and morality. The volume of Pratchett's output is also appealing, especially if you tend to burn through books as fast as I do. And, while nearly all of the books go together in the "Discworld series", it's not a sequential set like Harry Potter: nearly all the books are meant to stand alone as complete stories in their own right. Of course, the more you read the more you come to learn about Pratchett's bizarre universe, and the more fun each book becomes.

So yeah, if you're secure in your self-image and want a good fun read, there's your suggestion for the day.

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And just to let you know, I also read totally serious scholarly works about highway engineering and communism and environmental pollution too; only not this week.

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