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(This review was written by a non-native English speaker as a project for school) “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams (1979) is a book about everything. It is a book about hitchhiking, a book about the galaxy and of course a book about the guide to all of that. The book challenges the reader in the weirdest of ways to think about life and the things in it – and does this pretty damn well. The book starts off by introducing Arthur Dent to the reader. Arthur seems like a very laid-back and intelligent man who seems to know what he’s doing and his exact reasoning behind why he’s doing it. That is, until, he looks out of his window to see rows of bulldozers outside his house, ready to tear the place to smithereens. One thing leads to another, and suddenly, planet Earth doesn’t exist anymore. In addition to that, our new friend finds himself in a Vogon spaceship with his old friend, Ford Prefect. The hitchhiking has begun. The Vogons don’t, however, think too fondly of their new secret hitchhiker passengers, and throw them out into space in no time. The old friends find themselves in a new spaceship, this time not owned by the Vogons. After a very unpleasant ride in hyperspace and almost infinite improbability Ford finds out the spaceship belongs to an old friend of his, Zaphod Beeblebrox. Zaphod’s partner in life, Trillian. The four of them continue on their galactic travel program at several times the speed of light until they find themselves orbiting planet Magrathea. After landing on the planet their ways separate and Arthur finds a local who tells him about the answer to “the great question of Life, the Universe and Everything” meanwhile the other three make friends with the true dominant species of the now long-gone Earth. In the “Guide to the Guide” before the actual novel starts, Adams tells about the origins of the book. After reading the book, remembering Adams mentioning how the idea for the book started “while I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1971.” If you want a hint at what the book feels like to read, that might give you some idea of it. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a sci-fi comedy novel that covers physics, philosophy and space travel. I think it must be best enjoyed by people who are even vaguely interested in physics and people who like jokes about logical contradictions – this book has a lot of them. I personally enjoyed reading it quite a lot, but the lack of a traditional type of plot – one with love stories, problem solving, intense action sequences and so on – can and did make the book hard to read. Yes, if you ask me, the book lacks an actual plot – instead it’s more of a memoir of a time that never happened; constantly telling you what happens, what happened and what will happen next. I feel the book didn’t “grab” me into it until the last 80 pages or so – but once the book grabs you, I can tell you it really does grab you. I am amazed at how successfully Adams captured the core fundamentals of improbability, space travel and philosophy in a novel that can be as entertaining as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is. I haven’t read a book all the way through in 6 years and I couldn’t be more glad that this is the exact book to end that timespan. As I said, however, the book can be difficult to read: All of the place names, people’s names, planets’ names and stars’ names outside our planet are very complicated and can be hard to remember. Not knowing whether or not you should remember someone from previous chapters can break the immersion badly, but luckily this didn’t happen too often while I was reading the book. The book also requires a lot of attention to be paid into it in order for it to give you the full experience of the story. I didn’t find the book to be easy to read in small segments – say, in 10 minute sections during school breaks – but instead the book requires at least a good 25 minutes to get you immersed into the amazingly weird world of space travel. All these caveats aside, it’s a great book. I enjoyed reading it all the way from the beginning until the very end, but I can’t say I would recommend it to anyone. If, however, you want to try out what it feels like to have everything you know about our galaxy and life in it taken away from you, this is what’s going to give you that experience, and you are going to love it.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New
Great book, not damaged, good read.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
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