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Discworld! I just finished the second one, The Light Fantastic, and loved it. Terry Pratchett is a brilliant and very funny author.

I find after long days of technical thinking I really enjoy a lighthearted funny piece of fiction to help me unwind and get to sleep. At this point I don't think I could handle much more math or computer science and stay sane.

The Vimes series is amazing... I think it's a bit above the Moist series but I absolutely love Raising Steam and, to a lesser extent, Making Money - because both characters are coming together. Still, I think my top pitch is somewhere within Night's Watch, Men at Arms & Jingo - I think Guards! Guards! is also quite good but Night's Watch did nearly everything Guards! Guards! did... but did it better.

Honestly, his books are just amazing though, quite worth a read.... possibly skipping to start at Equal Rites since The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic were less polished than his later works - but do check out the Tim Curry having movie covering those first two books... maybe bring a power point presentation or two along to appease any power hungry wizards though.

"The Light Fantastic" was my first introduction to Terry Pratchett back around 1989 or so. I was definitely hooked. To me, the first two books are lot more like Douglas Adams' books: vehicles for cool ideas and good humor, but not particularly interesting or insightful stories. The Discworld books would have played out pretty quickly if they'd stayed that way.

But then he got better. Much better. Much, much better.

If you don't feel like reading The Colour of Magic & The Light Fantastic (the sequel that completes the story) then look for the DVD of The Colour of Magic (it originally ran as a double-bill made-for-tv movie, the first was CoM and the second part was LF).

There's also the Hogfather, a book released later in the Discworld universe, that got turned into a double TV movie. It is a much more faithful reproduction as they had more time, which in the case of the Hogfather was truly necessary.

I know that I'm in minority, but could you tell me what do you find great about Hitchhiker's Guide? I find it ok-ish. It feels overly chaotic for me. Like it really tries to wave the idea of improbability at me and eventually shove it. Of course everything is exaggerated for comedic effects, but for me it's like it tries too hard. The result is very incoherent.

It reminds me of a few movies I enjoyed dearly when I was a kid. After a rewatch they seem like a bunch of good gags, that tell a miserable story. If I would judge the scenes by themselves, I would say they are nice. However if you put them in order, it seems forced to put a story together.

I had similar thoughts after reading Pratchett's The Colour of Magic. Though after I started reading The Light Fantastic it fell into place. I would say that those two books should be inseparable. Whatever happens in the first does not make sense until the second book. Now I can say that I enjoyed it more then Mort and Guards! Guards!, but at the moment it's all I read from Discworld, do maybe my opinion is yet to change. I wonder if it's the same with Hitchhiker's Guide. But I'm on 19th chapter of 4th book and although this one feels much better, whatever happens in previous three still does not make any sense.

I'll pass if you will tell me it should not make sense, that's figurative 'it' and I get it as it is. Because coherence is what makes a story for me.

I don't know about that - we don't have any real scale equivalence in actual life forms so I'll use celestial objects as an example. The movement of other planets has almost no impact on our daily lives - the moon may impact the tides and the sun leads to our day night cycle but we can't effectively impact that and so, for the average person, life goes on without more than a momentary thought given to how things are going on up there. Though, we are all vaguely aware that we could suddenly and arbitrarily be killed by an asteroid impact (much like a colony being arbitrarily chosen to become some kid's ant-farm - or being run over by a truck) it isn't in the front of our minds because we need to get back to filling out that TPS report.

Still, as a society, we have a number of dedicated individuals that do study celestial movements and would try and prevent a sudden asteroid impact, and we all do remain vaguely aware of what's going on up there. So I'm not certain how much I agree with the fact that ants cannot understand us. Sure we can't sit down and have tea with an ant and talk about the weather, but if the moon was a gigantic dragon that just moved really slowly in a mostly predictable manner then how we interact with it might not be particularly distinguishable from how we interact with it when it's just a chunk of rock.

A good parallel to think of here is probably Discworld, I might suggest reading The Light Fantastic if you never had to get a bit of a sense of how we might interact with celestially sized lifeforms and just how one-sided that relationship could potentially be.

The main reason for that recommendation is that The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, though fun books and enjoyable fantasy parodies in themselves, are really not representative of what the later Discworld books were to become. When Terry wrote Equal Rites and Mort, he really set out his manifesto for the series as being about this world, reflected in that world, and that theme is what really carries forward.

So with the caveat that you need to understand those first two books aren't representative of what the series becomes, you could definitely start at the beginning. Just know that across so many books, there's bound to be some unevenness. Some books are just plain fun, others have deeper messages, some are, frankly, just not as good. Early highlights like Guards Guards, Pyramids, Small Gods, Wyrd Sisters are the ones where you'll discover the real breadth of what he does. Later books can be less consistently original, but when you get to books like The Truth, Night Watch and Monstrous Regiment, there are some real gems.

But don't let yourself not read any of them. That would be a real shame.