Lest you think that all I read

are histories and books about current events, let me introduce you to Terry Pratchett's Night Watch. For those not familiar with him, he is a science fiction/fantasy writer who has most recently been writing novels based in his Discworld: a magical flat world carried on the back of four elephants riding on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. You should already get the idea that whimsy and satire are his stock in trade. Pratchett also rejoices in a pleasant writing style and a love of humorous asides and literate in-jokes.

There are many different regions and groups of characters on Discworld: Ankh-Morpork (a large and very grimy city, home to the wizards acadamy and the Night Watch), Ramtop (up in the mountains, rural with witches), Uberwald (kind of medieval, with werewolves and vampires), anywhere (Death, a Tooth Fairy, etc), and so on.

Vimes is the commander of the Night Watch, which is Ankh-Morpork's police force. (The Day Watch is a bit more political.) He stars in number of the books as the man who tries to arrange for some kind of order and justice in a city with an official Thieve's Guild and less than a dozen watchmen with no tradition of public service. As time (and books) go by he acquires more loyal watchmen, including dwarves, werewolves, and the incognito/unwilling heir to the throne.

In this book Pratchett throws Vines back in time to a critical time of revolution when the young Vines had just joined the force--and a worthless crew of corrupt doughnut-snarfers it was. Unfortunately, it looks like history has been changed, and young Vines will "go to to the dark side" unless the older Vines can figure out what to do.

Sure, it sounds unbelievably complicated, but this is all happening on the back of a tortoise, remember?

Vines indulges in too much irritable introspection for my taste, but I enjoyed the book anyhow.

I prefer the books with the Watch or the Invisible University (and Rhincewind the runaway wizard) to those with the witches, but I can tell Terry prefers the witches--they get the good lines. One series of books deals with Death, a skeleton with the job you probably expect, and his attempts to understand human life. I think the best of those I've read is A Thief of Time. I get annoyed with his dislike for religion (he uses Andre Norton's idea that gods get power from their worshipper's belief {doesn't sound a bit like Exodus, does it?}); and he's as careless with metaphysics as he is careful with logic (believe it or not) and physics.

From Pyramids this nice bit of physics:

Light moves slowly, lazily on the Disc. It's in no hurry to get anywhere. Why bother? At lightspeed, everywhere is the same time.

Or this observation about Egyptian-style embalmers

Possibly thirty-five years in the funeral business, which had given him a steady hand, a philosophic manner and a keen interest in vegetarianism, had also granted him powers of hearing beyond the ordinary.