Our staff share the books that made them laugh this year.

The 65-Storey Treehouse by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton made me laugh and giggle like an idiot. As an adult it’s hilarious and irreverent, plus it’s definitely good for your soul. Griffiths and Denton’s sensibility is an all encompassing kind of funny – the same way Pixar films make adults laugh. I say bring on The 78-Storey Treehouse. – Dani Solomon, children’s specialist at Carlton

I read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as part of the St Kilda Queer Book Club this year, and oh, how I laughed. Virginia Woolf, in case you didn’t know it, is a genius, capable of life-changing feats of literary sorcery. Orlando wakes to discover she is a woman (after being a man the day before) and reflects upon her new station in life: ‘Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. “If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow… I must, in all humanity, keep them covered,” Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chiefest beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman’s beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor may fall from a mast-head.’ This is absolutely one I’ll be returning to again and again. – Amy Vuleta, shop manager at St Kilda

I laughed more than once while reading Travels of an Extraordinary Hamster, a very funny collection of short comics that follow a group of animal friends. Hamster’s brand of over-the-top selfish, arrogant, snobbish, and just plain awful is exactly my favourite kind of funny, and, really, I couldn’t help but love him. – Bronte Coates, digital content coordinator

Tony Hoagland’s poetry collection, Application for Release from the Dream. Hoagland is my favourite contemporary poet. He’s at once profound, surreal, low-brow, hilarious, and always deeply moving. – Michael Skinner, bookseller at St Kilda

The Great Budapest Hotel tells the story behind the film and has given me hours of pure delight, demonstrating how intriguing Anderson’s unique perspective on life is. – Chris Gordon, event manager

This year we lost one of my favourite literary figures when Terry Pratchett passed away in March. In late August his last book, The Shepherd’s Crown was released. I hoarded it like a miser when it hit the shelves because I knew it was going to be the last Discworld book that I would ever read for the first time. I couldn’t decide whether to ration the pages – a chapter a day, to make it last longer – or devour it in one big gulp.

I’ve never been good at self-restraint. I gulped.

The Shepherd’s Crown is the fifth book featuring Tiffany Aching, the young witch from the Chalk. We were first introduced to her in The Wee Free Men as a precocious nine-year-old who decides to become a witch (with brown eyes and brown hair she knows she doesn’t stand a chance at becoming a princess). Since then, we’ve seen her grow and develop into an extremely competent and powerful young woman. This final book is hilarious, of course, and as I was reading it I found myself surprised into delighted laughter more than once. The Nac Mac Feegles provide an endless source of slapstick amusement, but it’s Terry Pratchett’s razor-sharp social commentary that I found myself repeating aloud to anyone and everyone who would listen to me. In The Shepherd’s Crown he takes aim at the class divide, at gendered politics, at religion, and the idea of ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’.

So The Shepherd’s Crown made me laugh, but I’ll be honest and admit it made me cry too. It’s Tiffany’s coming-of-age story, but for her to reach her pinnacle we had to say goodbye to her mentor and predecessor Granny Weatherwax, a much-beloved character in the Discworld series. Granny’s death – and more importantly, everything that comes after – is presented in such a sensible and straightforward way that it was hard to read it without thinking that maybe it Terry Pratchett reflecting on his own mortality, death, and the inevitable way the world would continue to turn without him in it. At the end of The Shepherd’s Crown Tiffany realises that Granny is “…here. And there. She was in fact, and always would be, everywhere”. As – we must believe – is Sir Terry. GNU Terry Pratchett. – Lian Hingee, Digital Marketing Manager