1. baskıda belli hatalar var. Her zaman olduğu gibi yayınevine bildirildi. Gelecek baskılar daha iyi olacaktır :)

I had to re-read this because I'm insane but I'm happy to be so because I still loved it.

Total truth time: it's not quite as funny or as sharp in the individual zinger lines as Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, but the long-running story gags are fantastically wicked and cruel and even profoundly sad.

It's also more of an adventure tale for Dirk later on, but primarily, it's all a mystery. Sometimes, the plot is as much of a mystery, too, but I don't care. :) After the rising of new gods in Asgard and the fate of soooo many pebbles, and the dark, dark fate of a Coke machine, who really cares? The novel is brilliant and creative and so darkly funny. It's enough to make me despair for modern literature, and this came out in '88!

Here's another awesome tidbit. It's the novel that I first thought of when I first read American Gods. All the greatness of seeing Odin on the page or Thor blowing up an airport is all here and the characterizations are brilliant.

Can I even say that it's even more brilliant after knowing the legends much better? You bet I can! I read this when I was 14 years old the first time and let's be frank... I didn't know crap. I learned most of what I knew about Thor from this book and the fact that there was some silly Marvel comic that I wasn't even tempted to read was about it. And now? Soooooo Nice! :) Even the little In-Jokes about the gods are all here. It's a bit more erudite than I expected it to be. :)

But it's also so funny! Do I love eagles even more now? You bet! Am I even more annoyed with Yuppies? You bet! Do I want to run out and get some 300 count sheets and snuggle in them, perhaps get an eyepatch and avoid big strapping men with hammers? You bet!

Poor Dirk. I have to admit that his Horoscope is always dead-on. :)

My one complaint is that there wasn't a whole series made out of this. I still wonder just how amazingly cool it could have been to have a full bookcase full of these and point to it as the most amazing thing EVAH.

*sigh*

Some authors just overflow with goodness. Douglas Adams was one of them. *sigh*

(See another version of this review on my blog: http://examinedworlds.blogspot.com/20...)

Typical inspired zaniness from Douglas Adams! While I still think the Hitchhiker's Guide books are my favorites, there are some great things about the Dirk Gently books. Dirk himself is an absent-minded savant versus the everyman ordinariness of Arthur Dent; funny things happen to Dent, but Gently is often the source of the humor in these books.

In this second book, we get more on the idea that all things are interconnected, which is a hilarious idea if you think about it. The new character, Kate, just wants to get a pizza delivered in London and makes some hilariously fortuitous bath soap purchases.

We also get the idea that the Norse gods have fallen on hard times since nobody believes in them anymore, which is perhaps a reflection of Adams's atheism in real life: if you think about it, who would really want to be a god when you can have clean linen? Perhaps the simple, mortal life isn't so bad, and you don't need to go on hankering after something more grandiose. The universe is a pretty grandiose place as it is, albeit somewhat less so with Adams's untimely passing in 2001.

“The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.”



So the title The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Souli s so fantastic! And the randomness, quirkiness and interesting meditations of Douglas Adams's detective, Dirk Gently, matches the tone set by that title. The novel even features the Norse Gods in the modern world (reminding me of Neil Gaiman's American Gods). Definitely a different take on Thor than you'll see in the superhero movies. The mystery/plot(s) are less the point here than simply taking the journey. In that respect, there's a commonality with Adams' more famous Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Getting to the restaurant at the end of the universe, for instance, is more important than the destination. For me, the randomness can be too random at times and not at all connected to plot, but again, I know that wasn't the point. I enjoyed! 3.75 stars.

“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.”

Der zweite Band ist auf jeden Fall etwas leichter zu durchschauen, wobei am Ende wieder viel miteinander verknüpft wurde auf die typische Douglas Adams Art. Manchmal würde ich mir wünschen, dass diese Erklärungen etwas länger wären, da es auch hier wieder sehr konfus wurde. Aber das Buch hat mir trotzdem gut gefallen. Wer den Erzählstil von Douglas Adams aus Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis mag, wird auch an den Dirk Gently Romanen Freude finden.

The second volume is definitely a little easier to understand, although a lot of things were linked together at the end in the typical Douglas Adams way. Sometimes I wish these explanations were a bit longer, as it got quite confusing again. But I still enjoyed the book. Anyone who likes the narrative style of Douglas Adams from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will also enjoy the Dirk Gently novels.

After the surprisingly disappointing first novel, I was relieved to find this more palatable though far from the classic Adams-esque work that I remember it being.
There is more to love here, Dirk Gently is actually in the novel most of the time, unlike the first book. He feels more comfortable and things are generally funnier and move along at a nice pace. The story itself is almost as wanting as that of the previous novel. There's some stuff about Thor and Odin being mad at him or Thor being mad at Odin. There's some goblin or something and a weird contract between Odin and some other villain or something who shows up literally in the last few pages. So, story-wise it isn't very good. In fact, the story is pretty abysmal. The stars above are recognition that it is, in fact, a very funny book in places and Dirk Gently a promising and bizarre protagonist for a kind of latter-day PoMo Sherlock Holmes sort of series.
Would I recommend this over Hitchhiker's? No way.

Entertaining, but not as good as the first one.

While trying to purchase an airline ticket to Oslo at Heathrow Airport, American journalist Kate Schechter finds herself in line behind a large blond man who also wants to get on the flight but has no identification or means to pay. The check-in counter is suddenly consumed by fire, and both Kate and the man are taken to a hospital with injuries. The only possession the man seems to have is a sledgehammer.

From this point, the plot becomes even wackier and involves the “Holistic” detective Dirk Gently, a bunch of Norse gods and some very strange incidents, characters, dialogs and events.

I like Douglas Adams’s style and humor and like this book too, probably not as much as the hitchhiker books but it is a nice and funny read.

Read this book when it first came out. Great storyline - truly holistic and connected. Dialogue is excellent, and even the minor characters are a blast to read. Only the refrigerator and boy were insufficiently explored, but this is a minor point.

Looking forward to rereading the third book, which I hardly remember. Also planning to check out the BBC television show based on this book soon - it was highly rated. As for the book, the proper rating is 'a suffusion of yellow' - which covers any number larger than 4.

I really really wish we got more Douglas Adams books, in particular Dirk Gently. I am one of the few people who actually likes the way he ended the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, but I wanted more Dirk and his very weird adventures.

This probably hasn't aged all that well, for a start there's a whole thing about how it's impossible to get a pizza delivered in London. I can only assume that was the case at the time of publication but what kind of hellhole was 1980s England that you couldn't get a pizza?

Also Dirk smokes cigarettes as per all private detectives before 2003. It makes sense for the character but I've become so used to a smoke free media outside of period pieces that I actually found it surprising.

There's also the way this uses a concept of forgotten Gods walking around in our world in a way that we've seen a few times now since then, so that element might not seem as fresh.

It's still a quick, enjoyable read and is easier to follow than the first book.

Fun, but I now understand what others meant about Douglas Adams being an amazing writer who hated writing. While it was hard to get a picture of Dirk and Kate in my head, as they seemed to more description of what they didn't look like, it took until their literal smashing into each other near the end of the book to understand what the book was about. Really enjoyed their breakdown of Sherlock Holmes famous axiom about eliminating the impossible, and Dirk's comment on the resilience of the impossible.

Better than the first lmao