I have a funny history with this book. When I was young, my mom got the audio of this book on tapes from the library (yup I guess I’m getting old). Well, some how the first tape got lost and my mom had to the huge fine for a new tape. As these things all ways happen, we found the lost tape (uhhh why it was in my back pack in my room I don’t know). So we had the first part of this book on audio and I would listen to it while cleaning my room (the things kids growing up with loaded phones with internet will never understand). I have so much of this part of the book memorized in Adam’s voice from that tape. Every single time I walk in to an airport I say to my self “as pretty as an airport..”.

Later, in late junior high or early high school, I loaned a boy I had a crush on my paperback copy I’d owned at that point (hey! I couldn’t just live on the first couple chapters forever!) and that boy ended up losing my crappy paperback copy and bought me a hardback copy in return. I got upgraded! Thank you random boy crush! Anyways, read the book or better yet find the audio read by Adams. It’s a load of fun.

Cant believe this is the first time I’ve written a review for this. I’ve read and listened to it dozens of times.

Sublime.

So it goes.

Bonkers

Your daily horoscope
from The Great Zaganza

Aries
Keep your chin up today, and take anything unexpected or unpleasant with good humour. Remember: taking everything seriously is a recipe for immediate -- and future -- suffering. Lighten up!

Taurus
Saturn moves into a happy phase today. Good for Saturn! Here's hoping that's also good for you. Cross your fingers and toes... if that doesn't improve the chances, I don't know what will!

Gemini
Just stick with the good half of your personality and ditch that @#$& other half of your personality, girlfriend!

Cancer
You or one of your other Cancer friends will probably mention just how much you're annoyed about trumpets at the moment. Random, but Cancers be cwazy.

Leo
Keep wearing that grin and be nice to people. They may even occasionally be nice back. Yes, miracles happen. Anyone who says otherwise is a lying bastard, and almost certainly a Gemini.

Virgo
You'll inform your Cancer friend that you must have misheard, since you're pretty darn sure that they were talking about Trump.

Libra
Inform your Cancer and Virgo friends that, seriously, you've heard enough about Trumps, trumpets and miscellaneous T words to last you four years. Otherwise, enjoy the sunshine and celebrate with Persons of Taurus Origin about how happy Saturn is looking these days.

Scorpio
Bright day ahead. Let your hair down in whatever physical or metaphorical fashion that you see fit. And yes, smashed avocado for breakfast would be a, ahem, smashing idea. Lucky numbers are 12 and 746,534. Oh, another thing to be pleased about is that you're the only star sign with lucky numbers today. Feel free to say "Neeeenerrrrneeeenerrrr" (or some friendly variant) to any other zodiacs.

Sagittarius
Your Save The Avocado charity idea is, frankly, absolutely and incontrovertibly terrible, and you should just join the hipsters and eat the darn thing. Highly recommended.

Capricorn
Don't let the fact that your star sign has easily the lamest name get you down. Fight back and show those others what you're made of! I mean that figuratively. You know, just to be clear, no flaunting of innards or anything unpleasant.

Aquarius
Enjoy life. That's exactly what it's for. Oh and for helping others, doing the right thing, etc etc.

Pisces
IF YOU'RE READING THIS, DIRK GENTLY, I'M AFRAID VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING YOU DECIDE TODAY WILL BE WRONG. YOU, MY FRIEND, ARE IN SERIOUS HOT WATER. YOU'LL HAVE TO USE YOUR HOLISTIC PRIVATE DETECTIVE SKILLS. THERE'S AN ODD DISAPPEARANCE AT THE AIRPORT IN STORE FOR YOU, AND A FEW NORSE GODS WILL PROBABLY SHOW UP BEARING AT LEAST ONE VERY LARGE HAMMER AND FAIRLY DISMAL PERSONALITIES. THERE'LL BE A BRUTAL DISCOVERY OF A FRIEND WHO LOST HIS MIND AND THEN THOUGHT, HANG IT, I'LL LOSE MY HEAD AS WELL. THAT ISN'T THE HALF OF IT, DIRK. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.

I love Douglas Adams but this book missed the mark a wee bit for me. Although the stuff with the gods was fun I'm not sure how much help Dirk was and the ending was a little abrupt. But otherwise, there were some funny parts.

It was funny and enjoyable, but the plot was a bit of a mess.

20,000 ratings, 500 reviews? Why bother to add another one to the masses? You don't need me to tell you to read this book, if you've gotten this far you're either already a fan of Adams or like me you picked it up because of the moody title and should have now found out that it's a sequel to the original Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Fear not, you don't really need to have read the other one to enjoy this additional piece of absurdity from Douglas Adams. Instead I'll make five points about the second Dirk Gently if I may.

1. I've read this book more than any other Douglas Adams book.

2. This is my good friend Emily's favourite ever book; she loves it so much that she judges people by whether they have it on their bookshelf or not, whether they've even read it and most importantly how much they enjoyed it. Happily I still enjoyed this book, my friendship with Emily is safe.

3. The BBC TV series recently aired and was totally and completely brilliant, the performance of Stephen Mangan as Dirk Gently is as close to perfection as you get in a TV adaptation. So good was his performance that I read through this book today and could only imagine him as Dirk, as if Adams wrote it with him in mind (impossible but Dirk doesn't have any problems with impossible, as long as he can find out how it's done.)

4. Written in 1987 apparently pizza was not delivered in the UK at this time. The horror! I cannot imagine a world where you can't get pizza delivered. No wonder Pizza Hut was such a big thing when it opened in my town as a child.

5. Combining the content of this novel and the fact that he wrote Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion, Neil Gaiman was clearly influenced by Adams when writing American Gods AND for the first time I realised that some of the parts of Good Omens I'd attributed to Terry Pratchett in my mind were obviously examples of early Gaiman.

And there you have it, another collection of words written about this book on GR. Well worth reading.

I rate The Long Dark Tea-Time of the soul by Douglas Adams a 3/5 or 60%.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy this book, it’s just hard for me not to compare it to the other work I’ve read from Adams which was, in my opinion, much better (hitchhikers).

Dirks philosophy of *holistic* investigation is on full display in this book as he goes through the most strange and mind bending journey to solve his case. He believes that everything that ever happens in his life is all inner connected. Connecting those pieces, no matter how strange they may be, is the true case that he has to solve.

While I do love this premise, and the book did swing back around at the end, the round about that Adams took us on was far too cumbersome in my personal opinion. Adams humor shined through again (I can’t lie, some chapters were so stupidly funny) but I think the tangents that he went on in this book made me loose interest at points. I found myself searching for the main plot at times, and maybe I shouldn’t do that with an Adams book as he likes to take the story wherever he pleases and doesn’t like the reader to guess what’s coming next, but for me I would have liked to stay on topic a little more .

I’ve read this book before. I love Douglas Adams’s work, but I had always remembered this one as being lesser Adams. Rereading it, I was reminded of just how incredibly funny he was as an author. And while I will always rank Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency among my favorite books of all time, this follow up novel deserves more credit than I had given it in the past. It made me laugh continuously throughout, even if I find the story to be less complex than the first in the series.

1 Jan 1988
The travails of trying to order a pizza, Valhalla in London, and unexpected encounters with Thor. I loved it.

16 September, 2012
Tash talked me into watching Thor, which I enjoyed enormously. And it reminded me of Adams' Thor, committing an Act of (a) God, when he can't catch a flight to Oslo. More than thirty years later air travel has only become more annoying.It's still fantastically funny, but I'm aware of a sadness to it that I didn't notice on previous readings. The heroine is a widow, the gods are bewildered, homeless and aimless, the yuppies are as annoying as ever. Adams has trouble with plot, so even after reading this at least three times, I'm not exactly clear on what happened at the climax. But with age I seem to have acquired some acceptance: it doesn't bother me that I don't know the details, since the crux is apparent.I wonder what I'll think of it in another thirty years?

27 November, 2016
I'm kind of astounded at what I remembered and what I didn't (the bath, but not the eagle). This time I'm amazed by all the threads connecting it to newer works and authors I enjoy. I don't suppose I'll ever stop imaging what else he might have done if he'd lived longer.

After having read/struggled through hitchhikers guide and the next few of the series I was sure that Douglas Adams was just too much for me to handle. So, after having an insistent friend assure me that this book was not as hard on the mind, I decided to forsake my very morals and read a sequel before the first book

Not actually as funny or great as I had remembered, thought now I see I only gave it two stars the first time around so obviously I actually thought the same at the time too. Memory is a funny thing.