I adore Douglas Adams and all his works, so it only seemed logical to read this biography. It gives a great deal of insight into Douglas, and was quite intriguing. I rather liked it.

I reached page 163 before throwing in the towel. And dipped through the rest. Way too much microscopic detail for me, and yet I felt I hadn't even started to know Adams at all. Pity.

I'm glad I finished this. I nearly stopped reading it a couple times. The first third was particularly rough going since it's mostly a relentless series of names and dates and places from Adam's early life before Hitchhiker's came to be.

(It wasn't until I was through the worst of it that I discovered the "glossary" of people in the appendix area at the back of the book. The appendix is amusingly written and I wish that the descriptions had simply been woven in to the text of the book itself or put as footnotes on the pages where the person first appears.)

Things got considerably more interesting for me after the Hitchhiker's radio show was underway and even more so as Adams first started to deal with money and the pressure of publishing deadlines after he was a "big name".

My biggest problem with the book (and I see that a lot of other reviewers feel the same way) is that Simpson didn't attempt to "get into" Adam's head. Events were told strictly as a series of known facts and as quotes from interviews. While probably as accurate as possible, it was far too clinical to be as fun to read as I would have liked. I'll be the first to admit that I pulled this from the library shelf with the hopes that it would entertain me.

But there is also plenty to like about this book. I did enjoy learning about the Starship Titanic CD-ROM game (which I remember seeing on store shelves, but never purchased or played), the h2g2.com website (which I actually DID visit during the height of the "Dot-Com" years), and other projects Adams was involved with.

I especially enjoyed watching the 2005 Hitchhiker's Guide movie after reading about all of the trouble getting a Hollywood adaptation made in Adam's lifetime. (I have no idea what Adams would think of it, but I'm pleased to say that I love it just as much now as I did in 2005.) By the way, it is really interesting that Adams is listed as a co-writer of the script for the movie given how things ended up before he died.

Adams isn't given an entirely sympathetic treatment, but perhaps that makes his good traits all the more enjoyable - knowing that he was a very real, flawed person like the rest of us who just happened to luck into something he was very, very good at and which became spectacularly successful.

Not a fun book, but certainly as complete a biography as we're likely to get. It also made me want to read two of his other books I've not yet read: The Meaning of Liff and non-fiction Last Chance to See. So those are on my to-read "stack" now.

It's actually pretty good. The author takes a very sympathetic tone towards Adams, while still managing to get the point across that practically nothing Adams ever said in an interview setting was the truth; that he was probably the most irresponsible successful author in the history of publishing, and that of all his well known problems, at least 90% were his own fault and could have been solved if he had only dealt with them. Still, it manages to present a sympathetic portrait.

The author stops the narrative every so often to point out that even though he had just analyzed one of Adams' cherished anecdotes and proved with documents and eyewitness testimony that it just didn't happen that way, he is NOT calling Adams a liar. Not at all. No way. It's just that Adams had his own way of telling stories, that's all, in which he valued entertainment over strict accuracy. And there's nothing wrong with that.

These asides are clearly a sop to the Adams geek fanboys out there (the type who believe that if one fact in a narrative is found to be false then the entire narrative -- as well as the narrator -- is COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY USELESS) who would be crestfallen to hear that their hero is a liar.

Another good thing about this book is that it is written in a straightforward style. The "official" biography of Douglas Adams is written in a pseudo-Hitchhiker's style: all puns, paraprosdokian, and using big words that no one else knows as a means of showing off (just like I did with that big word a few words back). When Adams does it it's funny; when someone else does it you want to piss on their front door.

great