Hitchhiker's Guide by Douglas Adams

Title: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Author: Douglas Adams (English, 1952-2001)
Originally published: 1979

Page count: 161

Dates read: 8/12/23-8/19/23

2023 book goal progress: 15 out of 23

An extra book for 2023!

Read my other book reviews from 2023 HERE.




Description on back of book:

It’s an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent . . . until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur’s best friend has just announced that he’s an alien. After that, things get much, much worse.

With just a towel, a small yellow fish, and a book, Arthur has to navigate through a very hostile universe in the company of a gang of unreliable aliens. Luckily the fish is quite good at languages. And the book is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . . . which helpfully has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover.

This classic plays havoc with both time and physics, offers up pithy commentary on such things as ballpoint pens, potted plants, and digital watches . . . and, most importantly, reveals the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything. Now, if you could only figure out the question. . . .

First sentence:
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."

Favorite quotes:
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t."

" 'You know, it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”

'Why, what did she tell you?'

'I don’t know, I didn’t listen.' "

"He was staring at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head while his house is burning down."

"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."

"All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place."

CAWPILE Rating: Overall - 6.3/10 - ⭐⭐⭐/5
Characters      - 8
Atmosphere   - 8
Writing Style - 6
Plot                - 5
Intrigue          - 6
Logic             - 4
Enjoyment     - 7
What is a CAWPILE Rating?

Review:

This is a wacky, but hilarious book. You never know what's going to happen next.

Now I'm off to read another book... but since a review should be more about the author of the book than about the writer of the blog, I will let Douglas Adams have the last words:

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit, etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is clearly a man to be reckoned with."