I'd read Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time previously, but it has been a while. Given I also read it early on berfore having read much of the rest of Discworld...
The story centers on Death's sort of nemeses, The Auditors, who prefer order and therefore hate humanity, and their plot to end time. Which means Death is running around with his granddaughter Susan trying to stop it. We also have Lu-Tze, the history monk/sweeper and his apprentice Lobsang trying to stop the apocalypse, and Jeremy and his Igor building the clock that will stop time and the behest of an Auditor who has taken human form. We also get a minor role in Nanny Ogg, who holds information Susan needs to solve the problems of what's actually going on.
Essentially, Jeremy is building a glass clock, that will trap the personification of Time in the smallest increment of time possible, thereby stopping time. (The way this is presented, and the reason I had it confused with a similar Douglas Adams quote, is that time is destroyed and recreates the universe every instant.) The Auditor finds that being in a human body creates individual thought, which is anathema to the Auditors. Lu-Tze figures out Lobsang can actually balance the time spinners better than anyone with no training, and winds up taking him to stop the clock from being turned on. We also get to see the other personifications of the Apocalypse, all of whom are dealing with the same issues the Auditors have, where having been created by Humanity, are now human shaped and dealing with human flaws.
While this will never be my favorite Discworld book, it is much more entertaining having read everything else. It's also a fairly good treatise on the passage of time and the nature of being human.
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