I came to this posthumous publication with some uncertainty. Was the estate of Douglas Adams attempting to cash in on whatever they found on his hard drive? However, considering the fact that he sold over 15 million books while he was alive, his heirs probably aren't short of a quid. I was delighted to find that this volume contains a plethora of real treats. Apart from his unfinished Dirk Gently novel there are short pieces, many non-fiction, along with speeches, interviews, & other items. All contain Adams' superlative wit & amount to a fitting tribute to a gifted humourist & environmentalist who left us way too soon (at 49). And they reminded me that it is way too long since I last re-read the Hitch-hikers series. Vale, Douglas. One of a kind.

It was inevitably at least a little disappointing, but then, this is the price of entry paid at the start, and we understand it explicitly: we will never know the end of this last tale. Further, we'll never know whether Adams would have kept it in Gently form, or figured out how to transform it into another (final?) Hitchhiker.

The journey through was sometimes a little dull, which for me was a disappointing realization as a fan of DNA's many styles and interests. This isn't at all unusual for a journey, however. There are always boring bits on the road. It was fine. I was traveling just the same. Some of the tech talk is outdated, but most still worthy of the knowledge and insight Adams had gathered, sifted, and filtered. The fiction, when I came to it, was a delight, exciting, intriguing. New scenery, but familiar, because it was Adams country, through and through. Unexpected laughter sometimes startled people near me, as had always happened when I read a Douglas Adams book.

Knowing and willingly paying the price might have made it easier when I came to the end. But I was still, unexpectedly, perplexingly, sad to reach the precipice, a road which was, assuredly, going *somewhere*, but torn away ahead of me, a great cloudy chasm in its place, and fuzzy shapes on the other side of it, too far to make out distinct forms or gauge the distance properly. If only. If only.

A collection of Adams’ unpublished works, an unfinished Dirk Gently novel, magazine articles, letter, interviews, snippets.

It could be more enjoyable with a much more composed editing and structuring.

Just finished listening to the audio version (read initially immediately after the ink was dry). Two things come to mind:
1. This is not Dirk #3, and
2. I miss DNA.
3. I was wrong to originally only award this a 4
42: I may have mentioned #2 before

(Numbering system courtesy of DNA)

A book by Douglas Adams. Well, it's not actually by him, except in the sense that they were words that he wrote, mostly in that order. But he was dead when it was published. Collection of some previously published essays and the fragments of his final novel, which was harvested in bits from filing cabinets and from the hard drive of his computer, including some bits that weren't meant to be seen by the general public, as they were deleted, but someone foolhardily recovered the bits and slapped them back together to make money. Adams died so young that my sense of what is right in the world insists that I cling to a conspiratoratical hope that he was a very shy and private man thrust into too many spotlights because of his fame and having failed at politely asking people to just go away and leave him alone, he had to resort to publishing notices of his death so that he could quietly live on the considerable savings from his books.

Come on, haven't you read Christopher Moore and wondered about the possibility?

A wonderful insight into Douglas Adams' brilliant mind. The tragedy of his untimely death looms over the entire book--when you read his excitement over new Macintosh computers, oh my god how excited and/or hilariously horrified would he be to see where technology is today? I long for more of his words and I am so disraught that every word he will ever write has been written. Life is cruel and unfair, but at least we can access this well-crafted collection of the last bits and bobs and know many Douglas Adams' fans grieve with us.

So far I've only read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but I do intend to read the other four books of the trilogy. Then, when I was scanning through articles and stories by and about DNA (= Douglas Noel Adams), I came across this collection of essays, interviews, speeches and the partly written "The Salmon of Doubt". I think it's a great idea that those remaining snippets on DNA's computer have been put together as a sort of memoire.
I have laughed so hard my stomach still hurts and it was a real joy! So get your towels ready ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 - 42! ;-D

First read shortly after publication, I vaguely remember being disappointed that there was so little Dirk Gently there. Upon rereading, I have the same disappointment.

Contains some nice bits and bobs published elsewhere, from reviews to anecdotes, and 10 chapters of what would likely have coalesced into a third Dirk Gently novel. Like earlier installments, it starts as individual unrelated fragments, unlike those, we never get to see the whole.

I'm very torn about rating this book, because it's just so many things crammed into a binding. Basically, it's a collection of essays that Douglas Adams had written, including a short story from the Hitchhiker's Guide series, and the first few chapters of an incomplete Dirk Gently book. It's so, so much fun reading what Douglas Adams writes. His writing is full of energy and wit and charm, and is just a pleasure to read. That's one of the great parts of the book. But it's clear that the editors who put this book together after Adams's death just sort of jumbled a bunch of his stuff together. It feels like a cash grab, which is really irritating after you read the multiple introductions written by people who just feel utterly pleased with themselves and their ability to package somebody else's work. So, really, the book is kind of a mess and unfocused, but is sometimes really fun. I probably wouldn't recommend it. Instead, read the books that Adams actually has written and completed. Reread them when you finish them. They, and Douglas Adams, are terrific.

A collection of Adams writings, both fiction and nonfiction. It was interesting reading these at the same time as Green's essay collection, in that I found some similar flaws (I wonder if they are flaws in essay in general). Overall, I enjoyed some of them, especially the tragically unfinished Dirk Gently book. Others interested me less or disappointed me. Mostly glad I read it though.

There's honestly really no way of me writing about this book without gushing all over the place. Despite the undeniable brilliance of his other books, Salmon of Doubt very quietly takes you into the mind of the introspective and thoughtful Adams that must have spent time staring deeply into the unknowable. It gets to the core of what he wrote about and why; his fascination with science which he would eventually find amusing and eventually have it evolve into jokes that he'd write into his books. And to draw all of this together, the infuriating ease with which he places words together. Though he was notorious for procrastinating and finding the writing process as arduous as almost anyone can testify, Adams was also known (after being forced to) for being able to sit down and write straight for two weeks and come out with a book. And his humor from his blog writings are so casual and flippant that there's no way to not feel awful about how unfunny and unwitty you are.

I appreciated this book for the glimpse it gave into Adams' mind, which turned out to be a minutely aware and self-searching one about technology, about himself, about life, the universe, and everything. A bittersweet compendium celebrating the man he was and mourning the future books he'll never write, the observations he'll never perfectly word in a single apt sentence.

UPDATE ON "2ND" READING:
Technically it's not my second reading, but it's been a really long time since I sat down and read the whole thing again from start to finish. It's a book I remember huge chunks of, listen to the audiobook when I'm feeling restless, dip into it when I half remember a passage and want to reread the whole section and then end up reading the whole several following chapters. In a way I've read it quite a lot. But it's been a while since I really read it all the way through, taking in every word and really parsing everything he says.

Turns out that I've grown up a lot in that time.

I read it, incidentally, as a break from reading another one of my favorite writers whose most current work hasn't been evoking a lot of enthusiasm in me. What could be more appropriate, when disappointed by an author whose current work I feel like is somewhat regressive, than reading an author whose work never had time to grow?

Adams died at the relatively tender age of 49. It was unexpected, heartbreaking, and every time I go through this book, either briefly or wholly, I am struck by the sadness of that. He never got to see all the ways that the internet has exploded, for better or for worse - and the thing about Adams was the fact that, for the most part, he was expertly attuned to seeing technology as being for the better. His writings in this book about technology are the stuff I come back to the most. At a close second are his religious philosophies. What I got from his books at the time was not a resentment of religion but a fascination in our physical world. That our world was amazing and beautiful enough that religion wasn't required - but that didn't necessarily mean doing away with it or imposing that on other people.

And that's where I get a little relieved that I didn't have to watch Adams evolve. Because I've watched Dawkins do it, I've watched Fry do it. I've watched it turn into a spurning of religion in any form. Adams manages to hang onto his acknowledgement and understanding of it, but it's with a hint of European condescension and not exactly a difficult hop, skip, and a jump to the atheists of today. He paints it as something for the primitive locals to accept and the educated foreigners to understand. In that way, I'm glad that Adams is trapped forever in 2001 and older. It's one thing for someone to say that then; it's another thing for that mindset to holdout to this day. And I wish and want and hope and believe that he wouldn't have kept his foibles for another 16 years.

And by god are his foibles reflected well in what was left over of Salmon of Doubt. He's never been the greatest with female characters - I believe that it helped massively that Lalla Ward and Mary Tamm were sharp enough people to input personality into anything for the times he wrote Romana. They're invariably "attractive" (a massive pet peeve of mine being that female characters are introduced with a quantifier on that account - something, incidentally, that the book I was avoiding did) and often inscrutable. Richard and Arthur are both, in a way, bland, but are also both, in a way, interesting characters with interests and focus. His fumbling with characters like Kate and Trillian, bland with no personality or interests (or interests that change wildly from one story to the next), brings to sharp relief how bad he was at writing them. I don't exactly understand what was so incredibly inscrutable about the women-folk to Adams, but it does make me glad I don't have a book from him to be disappointed by. And yet, at the same time, I suffer under the missing half of Salmon of Doubt - about a cat that is missing its bottom half, like some sort of hellish ironic parallel. It remains unfinished, unfound, and despite apparently an entire well of writing in his harddrive, unknowable, taking the fate of Gusty Winds with it.

I love Adams - when I think of people whose works I've been invariably changed by, influenced by, Adams sits on top of that tower, beaming beatifically. But I'm old enough to opine myself, to have perspective and opinions separate from him (I didn't, once), and with that perspective, it's not that he's fallen in my eyes, it's that I've risen a lot since I last really perused him. This book is still incredibly important to me, and I won't deny that reading Dawkins' eulogy at the end still brings me to tears.

This is most definitely not "Dirk Gently #3".
This is a motley collection of odds and ends found on Douglas Adams' many hard disks after his sudden death.
There is the beginning of a Dirk Gently story here that is going nowhere, padded with some stuff that just possibly might be connected to the plot, based on three sentences the author mailed to his editor. This whole mess runs to 79 pages. Very disappointing.
The rest of the collection I enjoyed. Letters, articles, speeches, interviews. The spirit of Douglas Adams, clever and funny, shines through. Still glad I got this in the library and didn't shell out any real money for it though.
And by the way, don't believe the subtitle "Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time" either, you get thirteen pages of Zaphod, that's it.