Discussion: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy By Douglas Adams
 

Join us in a discussion of the Mobile Read Book Clubs January selection.

You better start talking about this book, or I will have to start reciting Vogon poetry.

BOb

And go easy on the Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters. :p

I'm on my third.
Just started re-reading this the other day. I keep getting this horrible feeling like Im missing a third of the satire.
Anyways I found my self overly amused at all the philosophy involved with the sperm whale falling from the sky.
And for some reason Marvin is becoming my favorite character where as last time I just found him annoying.

Hello Ground!

After reading it, I wondered why I avoided it for 35 years. I saw the movie, and it sucked. Thankfully, the book has no resemblance to that movie!

Now I get the "42" joke.

It's been years since I read it, and I've loaned my copy out to my daughter. I should probably re-read it one of these days... it's in my list of favorites.

You still time to read it for the club.

Well, the Ford Prefect joke is a bit obscure now

Everyone has their favorite passage from the book. Mine comes from the entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide on the Babel Fish (chapter 6).

My father actually clued me in on that one the first time I read HHGTTG, otherwise that would fly right over.

Im going to finish reading it tonight so I'll get "_____" to show the type of things I think are going over my head.... maybe Im just paranoid.

Book 1 was good.. The rest was just a repeat of the first book IMO..

Just so long as you don't hit us with the works of Paul Neil Milne Johnston (no, not Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings — that was just put in to avoid the lawyers).

If you enjoyed the book, I do urge you to seek out the original radio series, available on BBC CDs, or even the original scripts. Otherwise you'll miss the rather wonderful Haggunenons.

And as for the book,

"Actually I quite liked it."

Life... Don't talk to me about life...

That was an enlightenment to me as well - I had heard and read it so many times and never knew what it meant or where it came from.

Although Adams always said it was just a coincidence (he didn't intend it to work out that way and was unaware it did until it was pointed out to him long after the book was written), when you do the math using a base-13 system, 6 x 9 does indeed = 42.

A real page turner...then it ended....too quickly.

I said to my self. Self, I must read it again slower and think about it. How scary!

Definitely!

The book is very good, at least Book 1, and the BBC TV mini-series version is rather decent, but the radio play is the original version and clearly the best.

I've read HHGG before, but it was more than 10 years ago. I knew I enjoyed it back then, so I was more than willing to give it another go.

Personally I love the humor in it, but then I've always been a fan of the British style of humor, and I knew pretty much all of the references in the book (like why Ford Prefect is a funny choice, what a zebra crossing is, and so on).

But what really stood out to me this time around - and obviously would not have last time - is how many parallels you can draw between The Hitchhiker's Guide (the book within the novel) and Wikipedia.

A reference that contains many omissions and much that is apocryphal or wildly inaccurate, but is way more popular than a "proper" encyclopedia? Sounds like a match to me.

Or maybe this passage which, while not directly applicable to Wikipedia, certainly seems to be in the same spirit, as to how it treats popular topics compared to the way a regular encyclopedia would.

And then finally I got to this passage, where the Hitchhiker's Guide seems not only like a portable copy of some Wikipedia-like reference, but also a lot like modern e-book readers:

I enjoyed the story on its own merits, but I think this actually made me enjoy it even more.

The other new thing this time around is that Marvin's lines were all read by Alan Rickman in my head.

Cray... great points. The HHGTTG was certainly the first eBook Reader and WikiPedia all rolled into one. I wonder if the founders of WikiPedia took any guidance from HHG or perhaps even got the idea for it from HHG.

BOb

I don't really enjoy Brit humor, and that is the reason I never read it before. However, maybe my great love of Discworld has tempered my dislike for it. I really enjoyed it, even the odd references that I did not understand.

Will someone please kill me if I become a Benny Hill fan?

kinda late for that....Didnt he die...!!! :D

There was this interesting invention in the 20th Century. A method of recording moving pictures with sound in full colour, allowing performances to be stored and played back, even after the performers had died!

The TV mini-series was pretty good. But yes, the movie was not all that good. What was very good was the radio dramas. They are excellent. If you can find them, I suggest getting them and having a listen.

I used to watch Benny Hill when it was broadcast around here. He was quite funny. Also saw his HBO specials too.

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I loved the TV Series even more than I like the Radio Series and loved the books. All part of my early years. Then I moved to London to work in a tech company in Islington and was surprised to see signs for the local estate agents ("realtors"? in the US)...

http://www.hotblackdesiato.co.uk/ "Hotblack Desiato".

If you haven't read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe that may not mean much but if you have he plays in Disaster Area.

Douglas lived in Islington. Strangely I now live near Liff (see The Meaning of Liff)

I'll agree with you about Benny Hill *shudder* but "comedy made in Britain" really has a much wider range than just farce, farce and more farce. They have some excellent observational comedy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rNjga5z7hw
and no-one does bleak humour quite as well as the British (and Arrested Development, of course)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Uc2...eature=related

Anywho, back to the topic at hand: my favourite version of the Hitchhiker's is the Radio Scripts that they published a few years ago. The descriptions of the noises they were aiming for are often as funny as the dialogue.

There are a few comments in this post that refer to specific sections of the book(s), I don't believe they are spoilers, but am not really sure (anyway, you have been warned ;) )

This is one of my favourite things about the whole series. The whole "apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate" quote applies almost as much to the book as it does to "The Book" (or Wikipedia for that matter). In the introduction to a hardback compilation of the first four books (which I have sadly now lost), Douglas Adams addressed some of the issues over which version was correct (TV, radio or book) - I think he essentially said they were all correct ;)

He also mentioned a couple of little things he included in the book. He asked Hotblack Desiato if he could use their name as he liked it so much, then after the book was published, fans complained to the estate agent that they had stolen the name from the book, and wouldn't believe it was the other way round. The other little bit, I believe is that the number he gave for Trillian's flat (and the probability of being rescued after being pushed out of an airlock) was actually the phone number of a flat he lived in in London.

I think there were a few more bits and pieces, but they are the ones that really stick out in my mind. I love the books, have probably read them all three or four times, and I think my favourite character is Marvin. Fits in perfectly with the BBC Radio 4 sense of humour (and the British one for that matter). My favourite aspect of the book is probably the random, one-off moments (that sometimes receive a reprise later on - stand-up comedian style) that will usually progress the story a little, but not always (for example the fjords, the girl in the cafe who I wish had remained a one-off, being dead for a year for tax purposes, and of course, the terrible pain in all the diodes down my left-hand side).

All in all, the combination of humour and a silly, and sometimes little adhered to, plot make the first book in the series (and indeed the whole series) one of my favourite ever, and one that I periodically re-read and pick up something new. I would recommend it to anyone.

I agree. The radio show (which came first) was the best.

Best to worst:

Radio
Books
TV Show
Movie

In that order. The worst part of the movie, outside of all the changes from what went before, was that it made Marvin look Disney-cute. The clunker from the TV show wasn't how I pictured Marvin, either, but it was far closer than the movie version.

Hahahhaha....Even more re-runs....!!!! :rofl:

Benny Hill is not British humour. Only Americans find him funny; British people just cringe.

We like him 'cause he's naughty! :p

I'm glad you cleared that up, I cringe at Benny Hill and I'm Canadian.

For me the best thing about HHGTTG was that you always knew there was someone out there that missed something you got, or you missed something that someone else got. One of my favorite quotes from HHGTTG was whan Zaphod said: "Shee, you guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off."

Another Adams quote, or story he wrote.

"Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy, Canada is like an intelligent, 35 year old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner. In fact it's not so much a country as such, more a sort of thin crust of semi-demented civilisation caked around the edge of a vast, raw wilderness, full of heat and dust and hopping things."

Douglas Adams

If you would like to read the rest of that quote go to: http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-08-a.html

My dad is from Grenada and found Hill to be hilarious. I'm a Bahamian female, and found him grossly-funny; like when your friend does something disgusting but you can't help but laugh.
I really don't see how nationality makes any difference.

Isn't it 33?

Not really. If there's a 4 in the "thirteens" place and a 2 in the ones place, then using good old base ten to make sense of it: (4 x 13) + (2 x 1) = 54. Which in what we normally think of as what you get when you multiply 6 by 9.

I avoided reading HHGTG for so long and after reading it this month thought it was ok. Nothing spectacular or very funny, just quirky. It's a good short read and the second book is almost as good as the first. I just finished the third book and didn't like it at all. Douglas Adams is an acquired taste.

I first read HHGTG as a teenager in the 1980's. *After* reading Life, the Universe & Everything. LTU&E made a lot more sense--but was still damn funny--after reading HHGTG.

I have no idea how many times I've read HHGTG at this point. At least 10, I'm sure. It's funny every time.

I've done readings of Chapter 18 (the falling whale) for friends before as an introduction to how funny the book is. Or just to read it. It's a great chapter. I've also done readings about the art--or rather the knack--of flying.

I love those books. Some day I'll read "Mostly Harmless", the fifth book in the trilogy (it's not in my "More than Complete" volume).

-David

I think this sentence--- 'By a curious coincidence, “None at all” is exactly how much suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed'---is one of my favourite transition sentences in all of literature :)

And who else but Adams would have ever conceived of a character responding to the announcement by a friend that he is from another planet and that the Earth is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspatial express bypass with the words, "This must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

I'm very fond of the scene with Deep Thought, Majikthise and Vroomfondel.

"I mean, what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?"