One of the most annoying things about reading the Kindle edition of this book was the fact that popular highlights show up and you can't turn them off, at least not easily. It drove me mad. It was inevitably the parts that you'd pick out as funny for yourself, not anything surprisingly good...

Anyway, I grew up with Douglas Adams' work in the background, on the radio while we ate or while me and my sister played after dinner and my dad tried to relax. He's a big Douglas Adams fan, though he sticks mostly to the radio stuff, thinking that has more life.

I do enjoy Douglas Adams' writing, but I didn't find Dirk Gently as compulsive to read as Hitchhiker's Guide. There were a lot of good bits -- things I might pull out as memorable quotes -- but it didn't come out that memorably as a whole. The quotes are memorable without the story surrounding them. They're sort of bon mots that felt sort of pasted in, for the most part.

It's fun, don't get me wrong, and it was excellent train reading: entertaining without needing my full focus.

I am a firm believer that a bit of British humor is good for the soul...
And I am quite American, in case you did not know...

n  n    “Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see?”n  n

Douglas Adams has a highly quotable, laugh out loud writing style which I adore; I seem to remember a blurb describing this book as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with significantly fewer spaceships (I apologize that my memory fails on whom I heard this from) I can't think of a better description myself.

This book will forever be on my list of favorite books of all time.
There's really not much more I can say about it which could express my love.

n  Some of My Favorite Moments:n

“Hello, Michael? Yes, it’s Susan. Susan Way. You said I shouldcall you if I was free this evening and I said I’d rather be dead in aditch, remember? Well, I suddenly discover that I am free, absolutely,completely and utterly free, and there isn’t a decent ditch for milesaround. Make your move while you’ve got your chance is my advice toyou. I’ll be at the Tangiers Club in half an hour.”

“The teacher usually learns morethan the pupil. Isn’t that true?”
“It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,” came a lowgrowl from somewhere on the table, “without undergoing a pre-frontallobotomy.”

...he walked a little like an affrontedheron.
The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainlyrestlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape froma sack.

“It seems odd,don’t you think, that the quality of the food should vary inverselywith the brightness of the lighting. Makes you wonder what culinaryheights the kitchen staff could rise to if you confined them to perpetual darkness.”

“Well,” said Reg, in a loudly confidential whisper, as if introducing the subject of nipple-piercing in a nunnery, “I hear you’vesuddenly done very well for yourself, at last, hmmm?”

“Did you know, young lady,” said Watkin to her, “that the Book of Revelation was written on Patmos? It was indeed. By Saint John the Divine, as you know. To me it shows very clear signs of having been written while waiting for a ferry. Oh, yes, I think so. It starts off, doesn’t it, with that kind of dreaminess you get when you’re killing time, getting bored, you know, just making things up, and then gradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair. I find that very suggestive.”

Pink valleys, hermaphrodite tables, these were all natural stages through which one had to pass on the path to true enlightenment.

The door was the way to…to…
The Door was The Way.
Good.
Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to.

By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of the most exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myth that he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat.
What did “psychosassic” mean?
It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meantanything at all.

“Or maybe she decided that an evening with your old tutor would be blisteringly dull and opted for the more exhilarating course of washing her hair instead. Dear me, I know what I would have done. It’s only lack of hair that forces me to pursue such a hectic social round these days.”

Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn’t the slightest idea whathe was meant to do about it. It wasn’t a situation he had encountered before.

"...I bet that even the very lowest form of dysentery amoeba shows up to take its girlfriend out for a quick trot around the stomach lining once in a while...”

Richard reflected that Dirk’s was a face into which too much had already been put. What with that and the amount he talked, the traffic through his mouth was almost incessant. His ears, on the other hand, remained almost totally unused in normal conversation.

“Exploiting?” asked Dirk. “Well, I suppose it would be if any body ever paid me, but I do assure you, my dear Richard, that there never seems to be the remotest danger of that...”

“Let us go. Let us leave this festering hell hole. Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not effit after all.”

“Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see?”

“Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coinand the catflap!”
“The what?” said Richard.
“The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a…”
“Yes,” said Richard, “there was also the small matter of gravity.”
“Gravity,” said Dirk with a slightly dismissive shrug, “yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely adiscovery. It was there to be discovered.”
He took a penny out of his pocket and tossed it casually on to the pebbles that ran alongside the paved pathway.
“You see?” he said, “They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap…ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention.”

“...If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.”

“Now. Having saved the entire human race from extinction I could do with a pizza...”

Given how huge a Douglas Adams fan I have always thought myself as, I was surprised at how little I liked this book. And guilty, I feel guilty. One star is added on for the guilt.
But, in truth, in retrospect, I don't remember liking this one anywhere near as much as Hitchhikers. The humor is a little flat and often forced, nothing has aged well (the ga-ga'ing over computers seems childish these days) and the plot, rehashes of two episodes of Doctor Who that Adams wrote, is too confusing and uninteresting to have any kind of effect. Plus, Dirk Gently shows up literally only halfway through the book and since he is the only really interesting person around we end up with only half of a book of interesting characters.
I guess they can't all be zingers.

As a reread I prefer these to, "Hitchhiker." Funny well done.

Probably 3.5 stars for this one.

As usual, I quite enjoyed Adams's humor and brilliance, but this one, to me, isn't his best work. It seemed rather... erratic in the beginning and then a bit hurried at the end. It was very speculative, and very contemplative and assumed that the reader (or in my case, listener) was keeping right up, but I don't fault Adams for that. I don't want the book to dumb anything down for me. Although, if it dumbs things down for a character in the book, that's perfectly fine. ;)

I really loved the humor in this book, and I think I'll read the second book in the series, as I want to read everything that Adams has written if I can. I think reading this would be more conducive than listening to it was, especially listening while working - tedious as the work may be.

So, overall, I liked it. I laughed out loud quite a few times, and that's good enough for me.

This was so weird I have no idea what I just read.

Look, I really loved the Hitchhiker series, and I quite enjoyed this one, but my general impression is that it feels a bit... dated, especially in the humor. Don't get me wrong, it's a fun romp, and some of the things it's trying to say are eternal.

I listened to it on audiobook and it was quite fun! It really started to pick up near the mid point and then it barreled through, full force, to the end. Richard was very much the straight man protagonist (in the comedy sense, though in the hetero sense as well). And... did I like Dirk Gently? I'm not sure! He's kind of a dick and I particularly hated how he didn't pay his secretary, what a shitty boss!

One particular highlight was Richard's article on music and measuring soundwaves, and how there is a lot of beauty in that. I didn't like how he called Susan 'hysterical' near the end. I also didn't like the cops joking about cop violence, that was a very very dated joke.

I did enjoy everything coming together at the end and, like I said, there were some pretty good observations on humans and their behavior. I will read The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul (mostly because this pen pal sent it to me probably 18 years ago and I never read it, oops).

2 estrellas... no se, nunca me "engancho" la historia

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

¿No les ha tocado que están en una reunión con amigos y se ponen a recordar una historia entre todos, para contársela a un invitado, pero como cada quien tiene su visión, todos terminan hablando de las anécdotas y nunca llegan al punto de la historia? eso es lo que siento que pasa con Dougals Adams y la historia de Dirk Gently. Lo interesante de todo esto es que Adams escribe todas sus historias (o de perdida las que conozco) con esta misma dinámica, pero con un nivel de éxito mayor o menor según su humor... o el del lector

“There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.”

Realmente no hay mucho que decir sobre la historia, siempre que no quieras agregar spoilers, así que de una manera resumida mencionare que los personajes son raros y tienen problemas de comunicación entre ellos, ya que muchas veces te dejan con la sensación de que a la acción o conversación que están levando le falta un poco mas para llegar "a buen puerto".

“Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.”

Aun así algunos personajes son buenos y hasta simpáticos, lo cual siempre ayuda. Los toques de ciencia ficción me gustaron, aunque creo que no fueron manejados de la mejor manera  Hablo de ustedes malditas paradojas temporales En fin, no es un libro de Adams que recomendaría, y veo dudoso que lea los demás libros de la serie (si señores, tiene mas partes) pero claro eso nunca se sabe jajaja

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

If you are interested in this book because you watched the Netflix series, or intend do so, my comments at the end :D

Adams nails it again and delivers a nice piece of fiction/comedy/romance/sci-fi/detective/fantasy.

It was a hard read though. I have to admit that I didn't dedicate as much attention to this book as I had wished, between my overworked and underpaid job and my messy personal life, I could only manage to pick this book for 10 minutes everyday before I fell completely asleep.

I haven't decided if I liked this more than The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy but definitely was worth reading. At least, the plot is excellent, everything is connected and all that at the beginning seems totally unrelated, at the end, makes sense (kind of).

The characters are quite enjoyable. Dirk is pretty stressful (not to mention annoying) until he actually starts to sort things out (or at least he makes you think he is doing so). Richard is quite funny, and the rest, even though remain secondary are well developed and have a reason for being there.

This novel has nothing to do with the series. Well, there is a holistic detective called Dirk Genlty who believes in the interconnectedness of all things and... that's it. So, 1) if you want to read the book before you watch the series: don't. It's not necessary. I mean, read the book anyway, but go ahead with Netflix. 2) If you liked the series and want to read the book: go ahead, you won´t find your favorite characters but chances are you are going to laugh harder, find even weirder situations and don't worry, Dirk is as annoying as in the series.

You can read this review and more in my blog :)

I liked this a lot more than I expected to. I had read the author’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about 20 years ago and, while I remember finding it mildly amusing and clever at times, I also found it too unrealistically silly to take seriously and didn’t much care for it. My memory of that book is too fuzzy for me to say if this book is significantly different in style, or if I’ve just become more tolerant of the type of humor. I do think Pratchett’s Discworld series taught me how to enjoy silly books now and then.

I really didn’t find this book overly silly, though. It was very funny and I giggled madly through quite a bit of it, but the humor mostly felt like an integral part of the story. In the past, I've had more trouble when the story just feels like a vehicle for the humor. The electric monk was the only part I considered to be completely absurd, but he was funny so I forgave him. :)

This is a science fiction story, set mostly in the present day on our world at around the time it was published in 1987. A computer programmer named Richard seems to be having a lot of strange things happen lately. There’s a couch stuck in the stairwell to his flat that nobody can figure out how to move up or down, he has an odd visit with a former university counselor, and a rather shocking experience while he’s driving, and so on. If I attempt to give any more detail than that, I think it would spoil the story.

There are a lot of different elements packed into a fairly short book, but it was all coherent and easy to follow for the most part. I did think the resolution was very fuzzy. I understood the gist of it, but I think it was stretching things a little and failed to take into account other possibilities. Overall though, I enjoyed the book and I loved the humor.

4 stars

I have loved Douglas Adams ever since he wrote the Hitchhikers series and I obsessively consumed the entire set in a matter of days. His writing style drives me crazy, and I always wonder, how can anyone write like that? Is it even possible? I mean, it clearly is, because he DID write like that, but still. He puts together ideas and concepts in such a fantastical manner, it seems like he is perpetually on something. The unreal fantasy in this book reminds me a lot of the Lemony Snicket series, which is also something I absolutely adored.

This touches on time travel, ghosts, paradoxes - I mean just look at the cover. It is ALL the science fiction with none of the boring overused tropes. I finished reading this in two days flat and the only reason I wish I hadn't was so I could go back and take it slow. Actually relish the sheer witty craziness or crazy wittiness.

I did go back and read parts of it. Well, most of it. Okay, I went back and read the entire thing. Slower. And since I knew the ending this time round, I read it all in a different light.

So yes, I do recommend reading this. And I recommend reading it twice.