I have to disagree with the sentiment of the thread. I loved the first four HH books. They weren’t great stories, but they were terribly fun to read and they were written with an intelligence that is tough to find in popular literature. In particular I loved the frequent interlocutory chapters describing all the weird and funny things going on in the galaxy. SLATFATF is a very different book than the first three but it was still funny, and when I read it as a nerdy 13-year-old I feel deeply in love with Fenchurch (good-looking cello-playing woman who likes dorks? Heck yeah). It 's true that the plot of Book 4 fizzled out at the end, but like I said, the plot wasn’t the important point.
Mostly Harmless I disliked – there weren’t any of the interlocutory bits; instead, it was all plot and no jokes. (And no Fenchurch.) It seemed pretty clear to me that Adams wrote it out of spite for all the folks who wouldn’t let him alone about Arthur and Ford.
In sum, the books were never more than a fun few hours bullshitting with a guy who likes to think about the world, but not too hard, but I’ve always thought that a pleasant way to spend a few hours.
I have to disagree as well. Life, the Universe, and Everything was my favorite of the series … but I read the first four in junior high, which is my estimation of the perfect age for reading them. The fourth book was just bizarre, the first time I read it; I was more pleased with Mostly Harmless when it came out. Having re-read the series since then, I found So Long and Thanks for All the Fish a bit more readable, even with the urban legend thing about the cookies thrown in.
On the other hand, I could never make heads or tails of the Dirk Gently books.
Hmmm. Now I’m going to have to go get Last Chance to See and see if it’s really as good as people have been saying.
I really enjoyed Douglas Adams books when I read them, but that was back in Jr. High and High School. I’m not sure how well they would hold up, but you know what? I don’t really care.
I remember loving them and that’s good enough for me.
Are you kidding?!? That’s one of the best DiscWorld novels ever! There’s more wit, humor, and intelligence in the title page of that book than there is in Douglas Adams’ entire career.
Yeah, I’m with the majority on this too. Life, The Universe, And Everything was the first of the books I had to slog through, and eventually with repeated readings I got what Adams was shooting for in the last three books of the Hitchhiker series. I never really go back to them for recreational reading, however.
For me, what made them and the Dirk Gently series somewhat easier to get through was reading alternating chapters…a trick I figured out after continuous stalling during a read of So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish. This removed the episodic nature of things and let me read the books as two distinct linear narratives before all the characters reconciled at the end. Having said that, I noticed that almost all his fictional work, barring the original Hitchhiker, is written in that style, and it becomes formulaic.
This doesn’t deny the sheer brilliance of some of the writing inside any given chapter, but (as an example) it is hard to appreciate the more subtle aspects of the first Dirk Gently book when you’re getting thrown around through two different plotlines at once and can’t quite follow either one of them. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that the whole Coleridge thing went right by me in the first read, and I got nothing from the constant classical music references until much later…when I did finally get it, it felt rewarding, but it took awhile.
Of course, that could be a comment on my comprehension skills more than anything else…
[egregious miss-quote]Bite, kick, scratch. Only one queen in the hive. . . [/egregious miss-quote]
DNA is often clever, often funny, sometimes clever and funny, But I don’t remember being moved by anything in H2G2. He doesn’t make me feel for the characters like PTerry does.
Last Chance to See is indeed moving, and still riotously funny - his anthropomorphization of the gorillas, in particular, was both touching and hysterical.
My friends raved about the series when it w3as first on the radio, then about the books. So I finally read the books (there were only one or two at the time).
I was disappointed, and surprised. It seemed that he lifted a lot from a Robert Sheckley novel, Dimension of Miracles. I later found that other people thought so, too, and that Douglas Adams was an admitted fan of Sheckley’s.
Adams’ stuff was interesting, and fun (I later did hear the radio serries on tape), and he seems to have given his own style and interpretation to the material, but I’ll swear it was Sheckley’s stuff at the heart of it.
Sheckley’s own stuff has been adapted, but badly (Freejack was based on “Immortality, Inc.”; Condorman on “The Game of X”, etc.), and a lot of people have apparently lifted from his work (I’ve said before that the bulk of the movie Total Recall seems to come from Sheckley’s “The Status Civilization”, rather than from any of Philip K. Dick’s stuff; Sheckley and Harlan Ellison think that Stephen King may have subconsciously gotten The Running Man from Sheckley’s “The Prize of Peril”.)
