The Autobiographies

This one is filed alongside Borges deliberately, because it is the same architecture put to an entirely different purpose. The Library of Babel contains every possible book and is therefore useless. Death’s library contains exactly one necessary book per person and is therefore unbearable. Same infinity, opposite problem.

The detail that makes it work is the sound. Pratchett does not describe the scale of the library, which would be abstract; he describes the noise — the continuous dry scratching of millions of quills writing lives down as they happen, audible the moment you open the door. You are hearing everyone alive. It is one of the best sensory images in the Discworld and it does more than a page of cosmology would.

And the rule is elegantly cruel: the books are readable but not writable. You can look up your own ending. You cannot alter a word. Mort spends a novel discovering that the only way to change what a book says is to break the universe slightly, and that the universe notices.

On the readability rating. Described vividly, and one book is consulted at length on the page — but what we are shown is the fact of a life being recorded, never a passage of the prose.