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A review by mitchfahnestock
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
4.0
Over the course of almost 30 years I have started and stopped this monster of a series at least eight different times, never making it farther than the end of Life, the Universe and Everything. Having moved to an actual bucket list item for me, this time I actually did it and it was certainly worth it.
It is hard to put into words how I feel about finally finishing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. I feel I will be processing this series, and in particular the ending, for quite some time.
The first thing to tackle with this series is deciding how best to consume it, as one big chunk or broken up into individual books. I would love to be the one to provide the best advice on whether you should break the series up into smaller chunks or just dive in and plow through and read it all in one shot, but I’ve stumbled both ways with this series. Basically, when you start this series, you are committing to a large chunk of time that I can only describe as Monty Python in Space. That is a good thing for the most part. Douglas Adams is a jester with words and plays with them incessantly. It is funny, very funny, but again his word play is incessant. It never stops; ever. It gets to the point where by the time Arthur and Ford are doing their semantics dance for the millionth time in Mostly Harmless, where the frustration with that cane really is felt.
Those words games can wear you down if you try to read the series straight through. On the converse though, the plot is dense and at times meandering and loosely connected so if you try to consume the series in smaller chunks by taking breaks between the books, you end up losing a lot of those loosely held together details. Either way it comes down to knowing yourself. If you love British humor, and this is some of the best, and have a high tolerance for that, I’d say read it all at once. If your tolerance for British humor isn’t so high and you’re a person that remembers details well, then you’re probably better off breaking it up into individual books.
Adams does a wonderful job creating memorable characters and worlds, and there’s a lot of them for sure. The names are mostly nonsense, which is part of Adams’ humor, but the characters are unique and unforgettable. From Slartibartfast and his award-winning fjord making to the loveable Fenchruch, the cast of characters is unforgettable and the real prize of the series.
Arthur Dent, the main protagonist, is one of these unforgettable characters. The series begins in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with Arthur having a very bad day. His house is about to be demolished to make way for a new interstate highway, only to be interrupted by the Earth about to be destroyed to make way for a new Intergalactic highway. Arthur discovers in this madness that his best friend, Ford Prefect, is an alien who helps him leave Earth and so begins the travels through space, time and universes. Arthur begins the series as a bumbling, clueless, unlovable dolt. After unmeasurable distances, times and probabilities traveled it is safe to say that he ends the book as a not so bumbling, still a bit clueless, LOVABLE dolt. One thing I was surprised to find over the course of the series was the emotional weight that Arthur’s character arch brought. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish is almost exclusively an Arthur story, and is such a change of pace from the first three books that I had to stop and wonder if I had missed something. It moves Arthur forward as a character nicely and really does a great job of setting up the final book, Mostly Harmless.
In wanting to keep this review spoiler free, I won’t say too much about Arthur’s travels other than what he’s looking for is Home. Arthur loses and finds Home throughout the books and the concept of home is what lies at the core of this series. It seems Adams wanted to explore the idea that you can lose home in many ways and you can lose sight of what home really means. You can lose home physically, you can lose home spatially, you can lose home in time and you can lose home in the multiverse. Is a place a home? Is a timeline home? Is a person home? Arthur explores all of these ideas through the course of his travels.
At the beginning of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur is portrayed as a loser. A loser in the sense of having no real friends, no real happiness, no real life so to speak. This is a symbolic portrayal of Arthur as a loser, but not in that sense. By the end of the series we find that Arthur is only a loser in the sense of what he actually loses through the course of the book.
If you like space, time, probability, lazers, alien worlds, talking mattresses or flying Bistros, then you want to read this series. If you want to read (and you should) 800+ pages on Arthur Dent’’s Great Lost and Found Adventures, then you want to check this series out.
The only losers you’ll find out there reading this review, are the ones who don’t try The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for themselves!
It is hard to put into words how I feel about finally finishing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. I feel I will be processing this series, and in particular the ending, for quite some time.
The first thing to tackle with this series is deciding how best to consume it, as one big chunk or broken up into individual books. I would love to be the one to provide the best advice on whether you should break the series up into smaller chunks or just dive in and plow through and read it all in one shot, but I’ve stumbled both ways with this series. Basically, when you start this series, you are committing to a large chunk of time that I can only describe as Monty Python in Space. That is a good thing for the most part. Douglas Adams is a jester with words and plays with them incessantly. It is funny, very funny, but again his word play is incessant. It never stops; ever. It gets to the point where by the time Arthur and Ford are doing their semantics dance for the millionth time in Mostly Harmless, where the frustration with that cane really is felt.
Those words games can wear you down if you try to read the series straight through. On the converse though, the plot is dense and at times meandering and loosely connected so if you try to consume the series in smaller chunks by taking breaks between the books, you end up losing a lot of those loosely held together details. Either way it comes down to knowing yourself. If you love British humor, and this is some of the best, and have a high tolerance for that, I’d say read it all at once. If your tolerance for British humor isn’t so high and you’re a person that remembers details well, then you’re probably better off breaking it up into individual books.
Adams does a wonderful job creating memorable characters and worlds, and there’s a lot of them for sure. The names are mostly nonsense, which is part of Adams’ humor, but the characters are unique and unforgettable. From Slartibartfast and his award-winning fjord making to the loveable Fenchruch, the cast of characters is unforgettable and the real prize of the series.
Arthur Dent, the main protagonist, is one of these unforgettable characters. The series begins in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with Arthur having a very bad day. His house is about to be demolished to make way for a new interstate highway, only to be interrupted by the Earth about to be destroyed to make way for a new Intergalactic highway. Arthur discovers in this madness that his best friend, Ford Prefect, is an alien who helps him leave Earth and so begins the travels through space, time and universes. Arthur begins the series as a bumbling, clueless, unlovable dolt. After unmeasurable distances, times and probabilities traveled it is safe to say that he ends the book as a not so bumbling, still a bit clueless, LOVABLE dolt. One thing I was surprised to find over the course of the series was the emotional weight that Arthur’s character arch brought. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish is almost exclusively an Arthur story, and is such a change of pace from the first three books that I had to stop and wonder if I had missed something. It moves Arthur forward as a character nicely and really does a great job of setting up the final book, Mostly Harmless.
In wanting to keep this review spoiler free, I won’t say too much about Arthur’s travels other than what he’s looking for is Home. Arthur loses and finds Home throughout the books and the concept of home is what lies at the core of this series. It seems Adams wanted to explore the idea that you can lose home in many ways and you can lose sight of what home really means. You can lose home physically, you can lose home spatially, you can lose home in time and you can lose home in the multiverse. Is a place a home? Is a timeline home? Is a person home? Arthur explores all of these ideas through the course of his travels.
At the beginning of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur is portrayed as a loser. A loser in the sense of having no real friends, no real happiness, no real life so to speak. This is a symbolic portrayal of Arthur as a loser, but not in that sense. By the end of the series we find that Arthur is only a loser in the sense of what he actually loses through the course of the book.
If you like space, time, probability, lazers, alien worlds, talking mattresses or flying Bistros, then you want to read this series. If you want to read (and you should) 800+ pages on Arthur Dent’’s Great Lost and Found Adventures, then you want to check this series out.
The only losers you’ll find out there reading this review, are the ones who don’t try The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for themselves!