My partner isn't much of a reader, but he has become an avid audiobook listener. Sometimes we'll sit and listen to books together after dinner, doing dishes or playing videogames or putting away laundry. Though Adams' writing isn't typically my cup of tea, this book was a nice listen. I think my fiancé enjoyed this book more than I did; he kept laughing at Adam's short quips and wit. So, for both my partner and I, I rated this book four stars.

This makes a good case for NOT publishing everything found around the house after an otherwise-brilliant author kicks the bucket.

I would recommend this book to people who are really into the work of Douglas Adams. In this book you will find letters, interviews, mails, random thoughts, and of course The Salmon of Doubt, which has the same style as his other books, but is not as innovative or surprising as the more famous ones. There was one section I really enjoyed in which he speaks his mind about the idea of God, and talks about the circularity of the definition. The tautological concept of the creator. I wish he had written more about it and in more detail.

A kind of poor book which just happens to be filled with awesome.

I'd really like a well-organized and indexed collection of all of Douglas Adams' short writings. Round up all the columns and editorials he wrote, the text he did for his websites, everything, and get it all tied up with a bow and some context. Salmon isn't that collection; the writings are just tossed into poorly-defined buckets with no real TOC to speak of (and let us not speak of indexes), and there's no real way to tell what's missing or what's even important. There's some occasional interesting serendipity to be had, but eh.

On the other hand, it's Douglas Adams, bringer of joy and wry, good-natured English despair, and even inferior collections of his work are crucial.

Mais ou menos como se pegassem seu computador e publicassem seus arquivos doc e bloco de notas depois que você morresse, já que foi tão repentino que ninguém soube lidar muito bem com aquilo. Contudo, nesse caso, você é uma das pessoas mais genuinamente engraçadas e queridinhas do mundo. O que é ótimo. Mas ainda assim não sei lidar com um trecho inicial de livro expondo um mistério do qual o final nunca saberemos. Volta, Douglas Adams!

Part memoir, part random thoughts, part story ideas, and part salmon of doubt. This was quite interesting even if it didn't have a full story in it.

An enjoyable but utterly pointless book.

I'm a huge Douglas Adams fan but sadly this book doesn't deserve his name. It's not that it's filth, or worthless. In fact this is has some lovely moments in the book and that's what gets it 2 stars from me.

But the issue is it's a book that shouldn't exist. This should be free on the internet, or some other format. You get a large amount of articles, a few random chapters from a book, a book that no one even knows what series it belongs to exactly, and that's about it.

The only author I felt worse about passing was Micheal Crichton, and his posthumous book was an almost finished manuscript, this unfortunately is just the building blocks.

The worst book in the world would be one you talk about with the author, read all the chapters out of order, and piecemeal, read a rough draft, read an almost final version, and read the final copy.

This is just the second step by itself, and because we all know there won't be a final book, it feels like a hollow last hurrah in my mind. I'll always miss Douglas Adams, but I'll honor him with his classics. Not what probably should have remained unpublished and unnecessary tidbits of his life.

I can't believe it's over.

Although this book isn't a finished novel, it is still brilliantly funny and unexpected. The essays on technology in the middle section of the volume don't add much, but many of the humorous sketches were delightful. The collected fragments of what might have become a new novel are amazingly entertaining for something so incomplete. Well worth reading for any Douglas Adams fan.

I'm terrible at reviews. Read it. Tell me what you think. It's... different.

I bought this book as soon as the paperback edition was published and it lay unread for well over a year. Robert Louis Stevenson said that, “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,” and I felt to have one last Douglas Adams book to look forward to would be better than to actually read it. If you are holding back from reading this book for the same reason then you really are missing out. Every week I wasted by leaving this great book on the shelf unread could have been better spent in anticipation of looking forward to reading it again!

I have read and reread this book now and like all of Douglas’s writing it never fails to make me roar with laughter. Broken down into three sections - inevitably titled Life, The Universe and Everything - by Peter Guzzardi it contains speeches, interviews, magazine articles as well at chapters from the unfinished book that shares the title.

The Salmon of Doubt itself stops abruptly and contains many ideas that had not been fully developed, but there is enough material there to satisfy any fan of Douglas Adams and his work. It is clear that Douglas’s world famous procrastination was not the reason he struggled with this book; but the fact there are at least two books mixed in there. Parts of the text are quite clearly a Dirk Gently novel - not surprising considering the fact he is the main character - and other parts have the feel of Hitchhikers, which Douglas was about to rectify just weeks before his untimely death at the ridiculously young age of 49.

It's basically a collection of Adams' writings and articles of interviews, some half-finished Dirk Gently story that goes to Albuqurque (New Mexico) and no further...

It's basically the literary equivalent of ADHD (I should know -- I have ADD).

Nevertheless, one might understand that a great writer and person was lost when he died much too soon at barely 49 years old.

Readers beware: The Salmon of Doubt is not a single novel, but rather a collection of goods pulled from Adams' computer after his death--including a draft of the first few chapters of his next Dirk Gently story (also titled The Salmon of Doubt, thus the larger part of this collection's title). Also enclosed in this volume are a series of short stories, essays, travelogues, and other random snippets, some of which date back over a decade, and most of which have little to do with the next entry, except they were all written by Adams.

How, then, to review this book? How does one go about commenting on a collection of miscellanea the author never intended to exist in single-volume form? How does one offer criticism on a draft of an unfinished novel? Indeed, how does one offer any insight into a bricolage of material that, pessimistically, smacks of the publishing industry's frantic attempts to make one last posthumous dollar off of a popular writer?

I answer through a personal narrative. Any review ever published is, of course, subjective. This one is more so than even most. There's your grain of salt.

My wife bought me this book for my birthday, and I took it with me when I flew home (alone; my wife wasn't able to accompany me) the next week to visit my parents. I read the entire book in one day as I shuffled between airplanes and ticket counters, fast-food stands and uncomfortable plastic seats. Much of what appeared in Salmon... was completely new to me, as I'd somehow never read Adams' shorter works--only his novels. But in short, I was both entranced and maddened: the former at the brilliant intelligence and humor that marble-streaked its way through the pages; the latter at the frustratingly incomplete Dirk Gently novel (imagine if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had only written the first half of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" before suddenly perishing, or if Shakespeare had never completed "Romeo and Juliet"). I saw in Salmon... sides of Adams both familiar to me, as in his intelligent satire, and unfamiliar, as in the extemporaneous and atheistic speech he delivered at Cambridge, sections of which forced me to close the cover temporarily while I pondered my own thoughts about the nature of God. Most importantly, through all of these scattered scribblings I saw the inner workings of a man who truly, admirably loved life. And as I turned the last page and stared helplessly at the blank sheet before me, and realized that I had just read the last "book" Adams would ever "publish," I was overcome with a sadness so deep and painful that I've never yet been able to even pull Salmon... off of the shelf again, much less read it.

Douglas Adams never knew I existed: we never met, exchanged correspondence, or even caught a glimpse of one another in a crowded airport. Yet I consider this man one of my dearest mentors, a man whose writing has shaped the last fifteen years of my life in areas too varied and extensive to number. How then to review a book like this? Simply put, I can't. I'm too close. Even now, five years after the only time I managed to read Salmon..., and six years after Adams' death, I'm too close.

Why, then, do I give this book five stars?

How could I not?