"A Stroke of the Pen" by Terry Pratchett

This is a collection of short stories Terry Pratchett wrote pseudonymously for various newspapers. Sadly, most of them are... not up to his usual standard. Some of them are also later reprinted in collections of his short stories for kids (most notably Dragons at Crumbling Castle), wherein he spruced them up quite a bit.

My two particular favorites were "The Haunted Steamroller" (about a haunted steamroller) and "Pilgarlic Towers" (about a bunch of ghosts who move into a government building and cause chaos because the government is trying to tear down the old castle they usually live in.)

Now, full disclosure: I didn't actually fully read like half the stories in this. They're from before he really started being a writer, so they're not exactly peak Pratchett, and as mentioned before, about a quarter of them have been published in other places. And I don't exactly want to see the less-than-stellar original story of Dragons at Crumbling Castle. (Well, had I not read the spiffed-up edited version Pratchett put in the anthology of the same name, I'd probably have happily read it. But eh, I have the actual anthology, which I should review at some point.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ to T for rude humor, probably. These were stories for children, published in newspapers, so they're not going to have the same content level as the main-series Discworld books or his short stories for adults.

2 stars. This would probably be a fairly okay anthology by anyone else, but it somewhat pales in comparison to Terry Pratchett's normal writing, which made me not like it as much.

(Endnote: Sadly, our library system is missing several of Terry Pratchett's books, notably The Dark Side of the Sun and The Last Hero. I've been looking out for a copy of either of those, but haven't found them yet.)