Review of the audio, read by Stephen Fry:

Overall, Fry earns a solid 'B+' for his rendition of the classic Hitchhiker's Guide. Fry has the perfect 'narrator' voice, and I generally enjoyed most of his character voices. Ford Prefect often has a rakish tone, his reading of Arthur Dent is note-perfect clueless, and Zaphod Beeblebrox has a deliciously smarmy confidence. It was a bit of a revelation to find Marvin more amusing in audio than when I read the book, although I feel like Fry might have given him a tad too much despondent enthusiasm. His reading of the Vogon gibberish as the Babel fish was inserted and translated it into English had me laughing.

No, my biggest problem is that I think sometimes Fry got a little too involved in the story, and his character voices bled together. He'd suddenly remember who was speaking, and pull Zaphod out of dashing Ford territory and back into cocky confidence, but it was often enough and in dialogue enough that I definitely noticed as a trend, not an instance.

Well, no matter; still utterly engaging. There was a distracting formatting issue where the pause between chapters must have been edited out between the end of the previous chapter, Fry reading the chapter heading (ex. "Chapter Five") and the continuation of the story, there was no pause at all.

Though Audible claims this is unabridged, I either spaced out a few moments (entirely possible) or it isn't, quite. I'll have to give it another listen-through as I'm driving. But I'm definitely enthusiastic about moving on to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe if Fry is reading.

n  Summaryn
n  n

Along with his friend, Arthur Dent escapes from Earth before it was demolished and goes for a hilarious yet intriguing trip through the galaxy.

n  Some fascinating facts related to this this book n
I thought that this was a book mainly for the younger audience, and I wouldn't enjoy it. Then I accidentally came across an interview of Elon Musk where he discussed his Hitchhiker’s-Guide-inspired Design Philosophy and told that it was this book that inspired him to make SpaceX. That, at last, convinced me to read this book. And it was an absolute joy to read.
n  n

n  Why are so many people obsessed with this book? How did it influence Elon Musk’s design philosophy?n
For knowing more about it. I am sharing the excerpts from Elon Musk's interview here.

n  Science Fiction to Realityn
Here Elon beautifully lays out the philosophical points from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which have shaped the way he thinks through tough engineering challenges.

n  Elon Musks’ Hitchhiker’s-Guide-inspired Design Philosophyn
1. "Question everything, including the question".
As Hitchhiker’s Guide teaches us, if you are given access to the Universe’s most powerful supercomputer—a system that can answer any question you throw at it—don’t waste its time with a question you haven’t properly thought through. The same goes for a beautiful human brain.
When approaching any challenge, first ask yourself, “Am I asking the right question?” Alternatively, “Am I being asked the right question?”

2. “Take ages to form your question.”
The climax of the first book in the series focuses on relaying this lesson to its readers: If you don’t understand the question in the first place, you won’t understand the answer it produces.

3. “Question your constraints.”
The world of rocket science comes with a load of constraints: Time, physical, budgetary, the list goes on. But, Elon warns, “Don’t design to your constraints without calling into question those constraints.”

4. “Don’t optimize a thing that shouldn’t exist.”
We all find ourselves in the midst of a task that suddenly seems silly. “Why am I doing this?” We are creatures of habit, and we are great at following orders. But, sometimes, we forget that orders come from creatures of habit. And, sometimes, habits must be broken in the name of efficiency and progress. SpaceX’s extremely fast-paced innovation makes it clear that they are great at putting this lesson into practice.

5. “The product errors reflect organizational errors.”
To be a great leader, you have to understand the trickle-down effect of your organizational errors. They will flow all the way down the chain, injecting themselves right into your products and services.
That goes for any level of organization, all the way up to whole societies. Starting on page 1, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy does a wonderful job poking fun at the absurdity of error-filled bureaucratic processes that trickle all the way down from a government body, forming persistent issues in the daily lives of its citizens.

n  My favourite lines from this book n

n  “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” n  
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n  "For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.” n  
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n  n    “Don’t panic.”n  n

n  Verdict n
4/5 This is one of the best Science Fiction classics out there that can make us laugh and think at the same time.

بازخوانی چهارم هم تمام شد. هرچقدر از عشقم نسبت بهش بگم کم گفتم،
حتی بیشتر از سری‌های قبلی ازش لذت بردم و دوستش داشتم

I came to Douglas Adams in the way a lot of guys do, probably: I was introduced to it by someone far nerdier than I. Some of us become nerds when people we come in contact with share their obsessions; others are born nerds, and somehow organically discover Monty Python & the Holy Grail or, say, the original BBC miniseries version of this book. And then they make you watch it, twice, and spoil all the jokes by quoting them alongside it.

If I remember right, this happened to me freshman year of high school, which is a good time for The Hitchhiker's Guide. Douglas Adams' humor is offbeat and makes you feel smart for getting it, and if there is anything a 14-year-old boy likes to have reinforced, it is his smug sense of self-satisfaction.

I went on to read the sequels, which kind of petered out for me (not sure I ever finished Mostly Harmless), but the first book is pretty hard to dislike. Though when I re-read it my senior year as part of a sci-fi/fantasy English elective, I don't know if the entire class appreciated it quite as much as I was expecting, perhaps because I didn't know that they weren't taking the course because they liked the idea of reading Tolkien for credit, but because they needed the credit to graduate and the teacher was really nice. Like, open book, multiple choice quiz nice. And some of them still didn't pass. How is reading 25 pages of Anne McCaffrey homework? It was homework for me to stop reading after 25 pages! Not that I did.

So, you know this book, I am sure. Probably in more than one of its incarnations: TV series, radio play, big budget Hollywood movie. I love its elasticity -- each medium offers a slightly different take on the plot, which seems appropriate for a "trilogy" that somehow has five installments. Though it's humor, it really is a great sci-fi book, with a lot of ingenious concepts (my favorite being the Improbability Drive, which makes the most unlikely things happen, or the Point of View Gun, which shows you just how insignificant you are on a universal scale).

After experiencing all of the various versions, I am getting a little sick of the jokes (Vogon poetry and depressed space whales are only funny so many times), but it was still an easy choice for this day of the book challenge.

Facebook 30 Day Book Challenge Day 25: Favorite book you read in school.

It's not you, it's me... well maybe it's also you.

Unfortunately this book wasn't for me. Some of the humor I liked but it was too absurd for me and it was too slow to really start.

I wish I had liked it as much as everyone else but it definitely didn't make it to my "favorite books of all time" list!

UPDATE: I finally figured out what was my issue with this book. There's a French movie called "Rrrrrrr" (similar humour to Monty Pyton) and I've had way more fun using the jokes out of context with friends than I did actually watching the movie. Recommending it was always a bit weird because it's just an okay movie but... the jokes are funny afterwards.

This summarizes exactly how I feel about this book!

I absolutely HATED this book. I usually read books before seeing the movie when it's released in theaters, and so I read this book. If there was a point in all his rambling disguised as prose, I missed it. Don't waste your time reading this book. And if possible, the movie was worse.

A work that showed humanity its insignificance and that madness is a general, entertaining trait in the universe.

One of the greatest milestones of the rare Sci-Fi comedy hybrids, although it´s losing quality after the first 3 parts. Fantasy seems to be more prone to comedy than Sci-Fi, I don´t know why that´s the fact. I would tend to call it kind of Terry Pratchett in space, because of the unique wit, just without the stamina for so many parts. Adams dying in a fitness center of a heart attack comes in here too, although he already stopped continuing the series years before.

More sheer fun than the rest of the serious
It´s just hilarious and very clever, using different comedy tropes in space, not for science! One of these ideas one has once in a lifetime, in Adam's case mixed with talent. It´s mostly constructed by

Running gags, some sci-fi elements, and comedy characters.
Thereby, the wacky protagonists construct the laughs with slapstick, some deeper stuff, and general strangeness. The underlying criticism level isn´t very high in the first part, which can mostly be seen as pure entertainment.

So successful because it´s so easy to read
There is better, more ironic, and more complex sci-fi out there, but nothing as pleasant as Adam's work. No need to think too hard or get depressed about human nature, no info dump and worldbuilding overkills, just characters, puns, and gags mixed with some dept and

The second and third part of the series include some of the best indirect social criticism too.
But it sadly doesn´t improve after that, I´ve read until the fifth one and Adams just can´t live up to the expectations anymore, starts recycling his schemes, and just isn´t as compelling as in the original trilogy. Maybe he had already enough money, wasn´t really motivated, or lost his muse, but it´s quite a shame because there would have been potential as endless as space for more, really good parts.

Useless fandom trivia
The author, as the story goes, had the idea while watching the sky completely wasted, some might say poisoned, by Gösser beer in my home country Austria. I don´t believe this, because Stiegl beer is just much better than this bitter concoction. Whip me with a towel if you have a problem with that, I can easily handle a little intergalactic spanking.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

A great book with a note: the story in the book has not finished.

This book reminded me why I like UK humors more than US ones. The jokes are clever

This is my second review of hilarious SF novel (the first is The Martian) and I decide not to discuss the content much. I believe the best way to enjoy a humor is if the reader has as little expectation/knowledge as possible, to optimize the surprises.

این کتاب ترکیبی از استعاره‌های ناب برای اتفاقاتیه که در اطرافمون زیاد میفته و گاهی شاید حتی بهشون توجه نکنیم، در کنارش با فلسفه‌ی زندگی و این سوال بنیادی درباره‌ی زندگی جهان و همه‌چی روبه‌رو میشیم که دلیل پیدایش ماجراهای این کتاب بود.
طنز کتاب خاصه، من یه جاهایی باهاش قهقهه میزدم اما نمی‌شه گفت که هر کسی با این سبک کنار میاد و می‌تونه ازش لذت ببره.

My 50th read of 2022!

I finally listened to this hilarious classic of the science fiction genre, which is narrated wonderfully by Stephen Fry, who really accentuates the quirky and witty tone of this story. It is the first time I read this, and I dived in blind, with no clue about what was going to happen, but that seems to have been the right call.

I thought the first half was brilliant. Ford Prefect is a great character, as is Arthur, and their interactions on earth are just great. It did become a bit too absurd for me in the latter third, but I was engaged from beginning to end. Definitely worth the read!

No soy de leer este género, pero tengo que admitir que este libro en particular me gustó mucho. Desde la primera página fui totalmente suyo.

Uno de los atractivos más llamativos son los personajes y sus maneras de ser. Son sutilmente diferentes, pero esa sutileza, paradójicamente, los hace contrastar mucho.

El final me gustó muchísimo.

Es un hecho importante y conocido que las cosas no siempre son lo que parecen. Por ejemplo, en el planeta Tierra el hombre siempre supuso que era más inteligente que los delfines porque había producido muchas cosas -la rueda, Nueva York, las guerras, etcétera-, mientras que los delfines lo único que habían hecho consistía en juguetear en el agua y divertirse. Pero a la inversa, los delfines siempre creyeron que eran mucho más inteligentes que el hombre, precisamente por las mismas razones.

I have spent almost six hours in the delightful company of Stephen Fry, reading the satirical science fiction classic with incredible skill and humour.

As I had read it before, I had to bow to Fry’s ability to speak the strange, evocative names of the characters without giving away his amusement more than with a tiny rise in the voice.

The story starts with a bleak outlook on life on Earth, of course. While Arthur Dent, a regular human being, is in a rage over a bulldozer which is about to tear down his house to make space for a bypass road, a slightly bigger construction project in space causes an alien company to erase the whole planet Earth for the same reason. Gone is our home, just moments before the extraterrestrial company receives information to the effect that the demolition of Earth is unnecessary.

Well, it is not the first time unnecessary things have happened in the construction business, and Earth is not that important anyway, from a universal standpoint, as Arthur realises while travelling with an alien journalist researching for a book called “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. After 15 years of studying Earth, he is able to expand the entry on our planet by adding a “mostly” to the previous one-word comment summing up our entire globe: “harmless”. Arthur, reflecting on the loss of Trafalgar Square and McDonalds as the planet is destroyed, has a moment of hardship accepting that all that is left of his previous home now is a redundant note on it being “mostly harmless”.

Thus thrown on an odyssey in space, the pair makes acquaintances of diverse kinds, always learning something new about how not to take life too seriously, while still trying to understand it. One fabulous scene features the travellers on a hostile space ship, subject to the so-called vogons’ Poetry Appreciation Chair, where they are kept in place while inundated without mercy with the unbearably horrific Vogon poetry, the third worst in universe. I imagine it a bit like being strapped to a chair and forced to listen to and appreciate some famous twitter that is produced on our mostly harmless ex-planet.

When asked to choose whether they prefer to be thrown into space or to appreciate the value of what they have heard, the two heroes deliver a duet of superb poetry appreciation bullshit bingo, leaving the mean vogon wondering whether he might really have talent after all: but being heartless and cruel, he kicks them out of the spaceship anyway. Escaping certain death yet again, with a second’s margin, the hitchhikers are picked up by another ship in an act of major improbability, which is accurately calculated for them.

The most impressive character in the book is the supercomputer Deep Thought, whose sulking voice is brilliantly interpreted by Stephen Fry. He has a godlike attitude, and is preparing for the arrival of the messiah of computers, which will ultimately trump him, even though it is to be designed by Deep Thought himself.

While awaiting the time of the new supercomputer, Deep Thought agrees to give the answer to life, the universe and everything. As the recipients of the answer are not happy with it, not being able to understand what it means, they set out to find the proper question to make sense of it. Deep Thought himself can’t do it, and tells them they have to wait for the new messiah computer.

However, being inventive, they try different questions that match the answer in the intermediate time, acting very much like true philosophers.

Their first try is a bit too straightforward:

“What is six times seven?”

Then they have a touch of genius, and find the perfect interim question for the answer:

“How many roads must a man walk down?”

“Brilliant!”

“The answer, my friend, is Forty-Two, the answer is Forty-Two!”

All universe must have conspired to make them come up with that deep question for the hard-to-understand answer. It could almost be a song, if you changed the lyrics a bit? Or maybe the kind of horrible Vogonian poetry that ex-Academies would award?

While our characters are off to have lunch at the end of the universe, Deep Thought is preparing for the arrival of his son, the new supercomputer. He has given him a name already:

“The Earth!”

And the most intelligent creatures on the old, demolished planet say:

“Thank you for all the fish!”

Delightfully irreverent journey through the nonsensical human existence!