I'm sorry I'm late to the discussion. I've been traveling a lot this past month for work and pleasure and recently returned from my latest adventure.
I really like the time-travel genre. This book was a re-read for me. I read both this and the next in the Dirk Gently series in the early 90s. I must have liked it since I read the second book. I've also read The Hitchhiker series. However, I remember nothing about any of the books other than 42.
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Originally Posted by latepaul
One of the things I like about Adams writing is that a lot of his jokes, which I merely thought of as funny when I was young, I now realise are astute and clever too.
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I'm glad that I took the time to research Coleridge and the two poems. Otherwise, I would not have understood "the Man from Porlock" punch-line. Considering there was no Wikipedia when I read the book last time (and I unlikely visited the library for research), I probably missed most of this meaning and just thought it was plain funny. Although I would have gotten more of the references to THHGTG since I read all these books in the same general time period.
One of the items that I found fascinating in my research of Coleridge is that he introduced the term
suspension of disbelief in 1817. The Wikipedia article is very interesting. It also includes a discussion of the contrast with J.R.R Tolkien's paradigm of secondary belief in the reality of the fictional world and that suspension of disbelief is only necessary if the author fails to achieve secondary belief for the reader.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief
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The traditional concept of the suspension of disbelief as proposed by Coleridge is not about suspending disbelief in the reality of fictional characters or events but the suspension of disbelief in the supernatural. This can be demonstrated in the way the reader suspends his disbelief in ghosts rather the non-fictionality of the ghosts in a story. According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is an essential ingredient for any kind of storytelling.
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