Probably should have smoked something before and/or during the reading of this.

Awarding one star for each of the following:

Digital Watches
Babel Fish
Marvin

Read for the Second Time on March 18, 2012

Rating: 3 stars! (After 3 years, I still liked it!)

Six hundred books... 3 years... in between. Me not being really a sci-fi fan. But, yes...I still liked this book!

Resistance is useless! says the outer space alien who first apprehended Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect. I might as well not resist. My group here in Goodreads, Filipinos, love this book as they voted it as one of their 100 Favorite Books.

I appreciate the creativity and imagination of Douglas Adams for thinking that Earth is actually a big computer that is designed to give the Ultimate Question to the Ultimate Answer divulged in the book: "42." There are also references to Christianity like in the introduction where "the man nailed unto a cross" and Deep Thought mimicking St. John the Baptist preparing the way to the "greater one" (Earth symbolizing Jesus Christ). Who says that sci-fi cannot be appropriate as a Lenten Read?

My favorite character in this book is that soldier who does not know why he is doing his job and why is he shouting "Resistance is useless!" I also do not know why I reread this book and why I have this strong urge of knowing the Ultimate Question so I have to read the 4 other books in this "trilogy."

Resistance is useless!


Read for the First Time on June 15, 2009

Rating: 3 stars! (I liked it!). Review below:

This is a fascinating sci-fi novel. In 1979, it started as a radio program, became a TV series and a stage play. The author died in 2001 and as a tribute to him, the movie was shown in 2005. I am not a big fan of science fictions in book forms but I grew up liking Darna, Zimatar, Magnun, Lastikman, Panday, atbp as komiks (there was no electricity in the province so we did not have access to television) and AM radio were the handiest forms of entertainment when I was growing up in the province. So, reading this book brought me back to those days when I was tremendously hooked in sci-fi believing that there could really be a stone that when you swallow, you can become a superhero without choking or needing a doctor to operate your colon later.

I picked up this book two years ago after receiving an email from a British colleague in the UK. He was saying goodbye and his last sentence was “So long and thanks for all the fish!” I wrote him back asking what it meant and he explained that it was from this book. I postponed reading this after finishing less than 5 pages of the book as I found British humor not really funny. There was the transcript of interviews for the movie casts and screenwriter at the end of this edition and one of them said that his daughter literally fell off her chair laughing while reading the novel. Maybe I am already old and obviously not a Briton but I finished this book in less than 48 hours and was able to sleep well (without nightmares unlike when I was reading the holocaust novels). Although I felt happy and light so I am not that old yet I guess.

The fish BTW is said to be contradicting the existence of God. As you have to put this fish – a Babel fish – for you to understand any language. I found it funny (which was not in the first 5 pages) and not sacrilegious as the Mary Magdalene being Jesus’ wife brouhaha that made the Catholic Church call for boycott during the promotion of The Vinci Code movie in 2005. I fish swimming inside your ear!

There are other funny and witty ideas in the book like the Earth as a big computer designed to answer The Ultimate Question on Life, Universe and Everything with the Ultimate Answer as 42. I have already lined up the 2nd (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) and 3rd (Life, Universe and Everything) books in my bookshelf as a To Reads later this year. I wish to complete by getting the last two (So Long and Thanks for All The Fish and Almost Harmless) as I would like to see how Douglas (May God bless his witty and talented soul) tied up 42 with the existential questions!

I came to Douglas Adams in the way a lot of guys do, probably: I was introduced to it by someone far nerdier than I. Some of us become nerds when people we come in contact with share their obsessions; others are born nerds, and somehow organically discover Monty Python & the Holy Grail or, say, the original BBC miniseries version of this book. And then they make you watch it, twice, and spoil all the jokes by quoting them alongside it.

If I remember right, this happened to me freshman year of high school, which is a good time for The Hitchhiker's Guide. Douglas Adams' humor is offbeat and makes you feel smart for getting it, and if there is anything a 14-year-old boy likes to have reinforced, it is his smug sense of self-satisfaction.

I went on to read the sequels, which kind of petered out for me (not sure I ever finished Mostly Harmless), but the first book is pretty hard to dislike. Though when I re-read it my senior year as part of a sci-fi/fantasy English elective, I don't know if the entire class appreciated it quite as much as I was expecting, perhaps because I didn't know that they weren't taking the course because they liked the idea of reading Tolkien for credit, but because they needed the credit to graduate and the teacher was really nice. Like, open book, multiple choice quiz nice. And some of them still didn't pass. How is reading 25 pages of Anne McCaffrey homework? It was homework for me to stop reading after 25 pages! Not that I did.

So, you know this book, I am sure. Probably in more than one of its incarnations: TV series, radio play, big budget Hollywood movie. I love its elasticity -- each medium offers a slightly different take on the plot, which seems appropriate for a "trilogy" that somehow has five installments. Though it's humor, it really is a great sci-fi book, with a lot of ingenious concepts (my favorite being the Improbability Drive, which makes the most unlikely things happen, or the Point of View Gun, which shows you just how insignificant you are on a universal scale).

After experiencing all of the various versions, I am getting a little sick of the jokes (Vogon poetry and depressed space whales are only funny so many times), but it was still an easy choice for this day of the book challenge.

Facebook 30 Day Book Challenge Day 25: Favorite book you read in school.

It's a sort of electronic book. It tells you eveything you need to know about anything. That's its job. [...] Which is exactly the sort of thing you need to know if you are an impoverished hitchhiker trying to see the marvels of the Universe for less than thirty Altairan dollars a day.

Anybody can have a brilliant idea for a good story, but it takes hard work and dedication to transform it into a magnum opus of satirical science-fiction. According to legend, Adams was lying on his back, pennyless and with a beer in his hand, somewhere down Innsbruck valley, gazing up at the starry night, thinking how great it would be to keep on hitchhiking all the way up there among the stars. The story may even be true, I don't give a hoot one way or another. I'm just grateful for the result of this flight of fancy that was first put together as a BBC radio show and later written down in a series of novels.

This here is a revisit, after almost thirty years, from my own hitchhiking youth to the current soft middle age comfortable armchair. I was afraid I would find the text silly, and there is enough inside that is chaotic and playful and improvisational, but there is also the "Heart of Gold" of the artist captured for eternity and beyond - the exuberant energy, the sense of wonder and the acid observations of human folly (making us understand we are not at the top of the evolution ladder is sort of the point if the exercise). In the introduction, Neil Gaiman refers to the author as : "tall, affable, smiling gently at a world that baffled and delighted him.", and it is this image that I see as I picture myself the hero of the journey, the Earthman Arthur Dent, who is send tumbling out into the universe one fine morning, as bulldozers gather around his modest home while up in the sky Vogonian spaceships are waiting to obliterate the Earth.

Arthur Dent finds himself marooned in space, with only an electronic guide book for wisdom and solace, but that is after all the human condition, and without a sense of humour we would have probably have slit our common throats before now. So listen to the words of wisdom printed on the good book, and get ready for the adventure of a lifetime:

... he also had a device that looked rather like a large electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON'T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters.

The plot is absurd and episodic, relying on word games, dramatic developments and wacky characters. The Brits have transformed this type of satire into an art form, starting with P G Wodehouse, who is cited as an influence by Adams, and continuing with Blackadder, Monty Python Flying Circus, Fawlty Towers and more recent shows like Red Dwarf. The Hitchhiker's Guide belongs in this Hall of Fame of intelligent and subversive entertainment, indeed it could be said to be one of the foundation stones of the whole edifice. Any attempt to explain and to describe the characters out of context is doomed for failure on my part, you simply have to be there to understand the importance of the towel in the career of Ford Perfect, the researcher-editor of the Guide; to be crushed by the ego of Zaphod Beeblebrox, president of the Galactic Council ("adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publisher, terrible bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.") ; to design fjords with Slartibartfast or to sigh at the pointlessness of existence with Marvin the Paranoid Android:

Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God, I'm so depressed. Here's another of those self-satisfied doors. Life! Don't talk to me about life.

Suffice to say I had a great time revisiting the novel, and that I even found some interesting actual sci-fi concepts among the jokes and the satirical sketches. The Guide is very much like a smartphone with acces to Wikipedia, and The Infinite Probability Drive is a cool plot device, allowing the adveturers to travel from one corner of the universe to the other in a blink of an eye ("... we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway."), but it was the description of motion detectors in entertainment devices that really rang a bell:

For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriantingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

The first book in the series ends on a cliffhanger, so I guess I have to hold on to the "a nicely chilled Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in my hand." and hitchhike in the Heart of Gold to the next destination for Arthur Dent and his friends. Until we get to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

... we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere ... and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

All time classic I've read the whole series of 5 books at least twice. The adventures of Arthur Dent leaving earth and travelling the universe are brilliantly conceived and so human. Adams was a great science fiction writer and died too young.

This is a book I’ve been meaning to read for a very long time, but have been putting off for a number of reasons: 1) It’s honestly pretty rare that I read anything published before the 80s unless it’s classic horror. 2) It’s science fiction, which is my most hit-and-miss genre. 3) I love the film adaptation, and I’m always worried, after loving a film adaptation, that the book will ruin the film for me and I won’t be able to love it anymore.

n  “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”n

All of that said, this is probably my fiancé’s favorite book of all time, and as his birthday is later this month, I promised to finally read it! It was a quick and fun read, but it’s a really tough book for me to rate. My feelings are so all over the place, but I ultimately decided on 3.5 stars, rounded up.

n  “If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”n

The single greatest thing that this book has going for it is absolutely, hands down, the humor. It’s very dry and probably would fit well into what many of us North Americans like to playfully refer to as “British humor”, but it somehow doesn’t feel dated to the 70s in any way. I laughed out loud—or smirked, at least—more times than I can count during this story, though I don’t know how much of that is in thanks to picturing the jokes being delivered by Mos Def and Martin Freeman. I’m honest enough to admit that I probably wouldn’t be rating this as highly if I didn’t enjoy the film so much, but that’s beside the point.

n   “This must be Thursday,” said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. “I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”n

I’m not rating this book based solely on its wit and snark, though—there’s also something to say for how unique it is, how original it was for its time, and how solidly it has stood through the decades. I always say I’m not a big sci-fi fan, so I don’t really know the genre as well as many of you might, but for any book to have become this big of an international phenomenon, and then to have stayed as such for nearly 40 years as of now, is impressive and probably worthy of praise just for that.

n   “Ford… you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.”n

Is this book perfect? I don’t know, honestly. I’m a broken record here, but with my ambivalent feelings for the genre as a whole, I’m not the best person to answer that for you. What I can say is that it’s a super fun read, and if you’ve never picked it up before, you should totally give it a try. Or watch the film. In fact, even if you have read it, you should still watch the film, because it’s amazing.

n   “So long, and thanks for all the fish!”n

---

Buddy read with Terry!

You can find this review and more on my blog, or you can follow me on twitter, bookstagram, or facebook!

Jedyny element, który mi się podobał to Marvin

It's that time of the year again when I take out the towel I embroidered with "42" as well as "Don't Panic" and sit down to enjoy this classic and silly scifi story.

The story is well-known to most but let me recap real quick:
Arthur Dent is losing his house because of a bypass. Funnily enough, he doesn't have to suffer the injustice for long because the planet Earth is scheduled to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass as well.
His friend, Ford Prefect, turns out to be an alien who tells him all about interstellar hitchhiking. Thus begins an epic quirky adventure through the galaxy, meeting aliens that use poetry as a form of torture and trying to get our home planet back.

Many say this book in a mess. And in many ways it is. But it's a good mess. The kind of mess life itself is. Humour is when you laugh no matter what. Douglas Adams was great at showing the tragedy in life through humour, making the characters here so lovable that I have no problem reading the story every year on the day he died far too soon (aged only 49) of a heart attack.

Here's to you, DNA, thanks for all the fish!


...
Yeah, I'm reading it again ... Especially for Towel Day ... xD
...
Every year I'm reading the book for Towel Day now (the third time by now) and every year it's as good as the very first time. xD Simply brilliant! 42!

In my experience, readers either love Adams' books or quickly put them down. I, for example, quite literally worship the words Adams puts on the page, and have read the Hitchhiker's Trilogy so many times that I have large tracts of it memorized. But both my wife and father couldn't get past book one: the former because she found it too silly, and the latter because he found the writing to be more about "the author's personality" than plot and character.

Whatever.

The first three books in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy--The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, the Universe and Everything--are inspired lunacy. The ideas, plots, puns, jokes, and phrases that fill their pages have influenced an entire generation of not only writers, but people from all fields. For instance: the Babel Fish software that translates foreign websites for you is named after a species of fish that Adams created in book one; you can find dozens of recipes online for Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters; the chess computer Deep Thought that lost two matches to Gary Kasparov in 1989 was named after a computer in book one; and seriously, who hasn't heard that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42? (For more of these, consult wikipedia.org's entry on "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Cultural References".) Chances are, if you're reading these books for the first time, you'll be surprised to see how many everyday things were named after Adams' creations.

The books aren't, of course, without their problems. Adams himself admitted that the Trilogy had, and I paraphrase, a long beginning, a long conclusion, and not much in the middle (though I can't remember where I read that). He was also regularly accused of writing for the sake of cranking out one-liners. The books as a whole jump about like a manic puppy on methamphetamines, and there are at least a few jokes in there that will completely fly over the heads of any readers who lack a basic comprehension of quantum physics.

Despite this, the Hitchhiker's Trilogy remains as the single most entertaining and enjoyable series of books I've ever read--a position they've occupied for some fifteen years. Adams' wit and wisdom still baffle me in their greatness, and he remains to this day one of only two authors who can regularly, consistently make me howl with laughter (the other being Terry Pratchett). Readers beware: if the Adams bug infects you, you will have it for life. And you'll never be sorry you let it bite.

I fell asleep while listening to this one... twice.



I fell asleep at the beginning of the book, and then at the end of it. I googled the ending because I didn't want to go to sleep again.

Don't get me wrong. I didn't dislike the book. It's just that I didn't like it either. It's not my kind of humor, not my kind of story. But I'm sure to remember to take a towel next time I hitchhike through the galaxy.

Arthur Dent is having a bad day his home is being demolished, a new highway bypass is needed progress you know, it's for his own good...really, so goodbye house. On the bright side (by the way), it does not matter either. Earth too will no longer be, soon just billions of inconsequential floating pieces scattered throughout the cosmos, no one left to remember. The powers of the galaxy have decided this little insignificant, dull planet at the edge of the Milky Way must go. A hyperspatial express route is being built, Earth is in the path no big deal to the rest of the universe, just a few souls disappear think of the convenience to others , people... His friend drops by, Mr. Ford Prefect and finds Arthur lying in the mud in front of the bulldozers, and asks him what's new ? And can he go to the local pub for a drink, they must talk... Seems okay to Dent, but first the intelligent man gets a gentleman's solemn sacred promise, from a bureaucrat (who shall remain nameless), that his house will still be standing when he gets back. Even has Mr. Prosser, replace him in the dirt (I can never keep a secret). After a few drinks which relaxes Arthur, Ford tell's his friend he's an alien from a another planet in the vicinity of the great star Betelgeuse, just 600 light-years away. Dent always thought Prefect was an eccentric man but this being England, perfectly permissible, goes on to explain he's a researcher for something called, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". A weird sound emulates from the outside disrupting this enlightening discussion, Arthur jumps up runs out the door and sees that there are no more gentlemen in the world now. Home gone, but the over excited man starts calling the wrecking crew unkind names. Such language (I will not repeat them, in mixed company, besides this is a family site ). People should be calm, always calm nothing to be concerned about, remember you are English...Looking up, odd yellow streaks in the sky Dent wonders, Ford did say the Earth would be destroyed today but he is strange...Stiff upper lip ...But something is occurring, though. Ford arrives and the noise level rises also...A short time later the waking, Dent...Mr. Dent, comes to in the dark in an alien spaceship , one of those that vaporized his not quite beloved planet, with Ford there... Evil green, and very ugly aliens the Vogons who like to torture people by reciting bad poetry, I mean really bad Vogon poetry, resulting in captives welcoming death, rather than listen to another word... Captain Jeltz hates hitchhikers, and Ford had a devise to enter the ship, secretly. But the clever friends say they loved the excruciating poem, of the captain's; obvious lying, the angry poet has the two rudely thrown off the craft into space, without... spacesuits...these aliens, are barbarians... They can hold their breaths for thirty seconds, so don't worry... A miracle, on the 29th second, they're saved by the President of the galaxy , in a stolen vessel. And the runaway politician ( surprisingly not exactly honest), Zaphod Beeblebrox is on board, so is his two heads and three arms, with his girlfriend Trillian and Marvin, the paranoid robot, don't talk to it, he's very depressing, you would want to crush him, with your bare hands ... As the semi cousin (what's that?) of the president, Ford Prefect is in luck. All the galaxy, are after the Heart of Gold, the new spaceship which can cross the Milky Way, in a flash, on ship the greedy, seek the legendary, lost and fabulously rich planet, Magratha. In the vastness of the whole endless Universe everything's is possible, except an android like Marvin...Remember the Guide's motto, "Don't Panic"...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy starts on a Thursday, and Arthur Dent is having a very bad day. Things start going sour when a construction crew tries to knock his house down so they can build a highway bypass through the land it sits on, and get worse rather quickly when the Earth is suddenly and completely destroyed. A galactic orphan, Dent embarks on an interstellar journey with his longtime friend Ford Prefect (who is really an alien who has been stranded on the Earth for the past fifteen years), Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is President of the Galaxy, Zaphod's girlfriend Trillian, and a depressed robot named Marvin.

There were some things I didn't like about this book, but overall I really enjoyed it. Just after the halfway point in the book, when the travellers reach the planet Magrathea, the tone changes from constant joke-telling and silliness, with a frenetic story and dialogue, to a more serious tone, with a more static story taking place in just one locale (on and around the planet Magrathea), with less jokes and humour and noticeably denser prose. This made the two halfs of the book quite tonally different from each other, which I personally found jarring. The book started to get funnier again near the end, but in a book that is only 180 pages you really notice when the tone changes for even 20-30 pages, as it did in this book.

I also generally didn't care much for the second half of the book for this reason; the first half was more fun, and I wish the entire book had been written in that way. It felt a bit like Adams got tired of trying to write non-stop silly prose and dialogue and somewhat gave up on that for a decent amount of the second half of the book, only picking it back up again near the end.

Some characters were also very one-dimensional and didn't add much to the story. The best example of this was Trillian. I would have liked to see her have a larger role in the story, given she is the partner of one of the main characters, but I found her to be flat and mostly invisible. Maybe she is developed more in later books in the series; I guess I'll find out when I pick these books up again.

Negatives aside, I loved Adams' humour; this is a very funny book, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. I thought some aspects of the story and world-building were crazy but absolutely brilliant, and I feel, with this first book, like Adams has only just begun to craft what will end up being a hilarious and impressive tale of our universe and its "history".

Recommended!

4.5 stars