Redheaded Reviews: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

This book is a favorite of mine and I've read it countless times but this time was special as my daughter is reading it with me. It begins with a house. Arthur Dent's house to be precise. It is being torn down to make way for a bypass. This is the first Arthur is hearing of it and he is determined to stop the bulldozers from rolling. His best friend Ford Prefect has other things on his mind, like hitchhiking his way off this planet before it blows up to make way for an intergalactic bypass and he plans on taking his best bud Arthur with him.

Sadly the only ship available to hitchhike on is the Vogon one that is currently blowing up Earth and who hate hitchhikers. But their workers the Dentrassis loved to piss off the Vogans and they let hitchhikers on. This is an important detail that Ford notes for the entry on Vogons because he is a writer for that amazing book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He was doing research on Earth when he got stranded. Earth's entry used to read Harmless. Now it reads Mostly Harmless.

Meanwhile, Ford's semi-cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is president of the galaxy, and Trillian is currently stealing the Heart of Gold a spaceship that has an Infinite Improbability Drive that when you first take it out takes you all over the universe. But even that can't explain the unlikely odds of the two of them picking up Arthur and Ford just as the Volgons are about to shove them out the airlock after reading them poetry which, Vogon poetry is the third-worst poetry in the universe and painful to hear.

Once the four get together the real adventure starts when they discover a legendary planet that isn't supposed to exist and decide to explore and get into all sorts of trouble. My favorite character in this book is Marvin the depressed robot who was created to express human emotion for the Heart of Gold spaceship and instead only expresses depression with phrases such as "Sorry, did I say something wrong? Pardon me for breathing which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it Oh God, I'm so depressed. Here are another one of those self-satisfied doors. Life. Don't talk to me about life." In the poorly made movie version of this novel, he is played to perfection by Alan Rickman. This hilariously written book with fabulous characters and fun entries into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy makes this book a must-read. It's on my top ten of all-time favorites. I highly recommend this book. I give it a ten!

Quotes

And then one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occuried, and the idea was lost forever.

-Doulas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 1-2)

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

-Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 24)

The ships hung in the air in much the same way that bricks don’t.

- Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 34)

Because Ford never learned to say his original name, his father eventually died of shame, which is still a terminal disease in some parts of the Galaxy.

-Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 48)

This is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn’t previously aware of.

-Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 50)

He would have felt safe if alongside the Dentrissis’ underwear, the piles of Sqornshellous matresses and the man from Betelguese with the small yellow fish offering to put it in his ear he had been able to see a small packet of cornflakes. But he couldn’t, and he didn’t feel safe.

-Douglas Adams (The Hithhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 56)

“Space,” it says, “it big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it it. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist but that’s peanuts to space.”

=Douglas Adams (The Hithhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 76)

Do you realize that most people’s lives are governed by telephone numbers?

-Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 101)

“We’ve met,” said Arthur sharply. When you’re cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidently change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your hood in an ugly mess, it tends to throw you off your stride in much the same way that this remark threw Ford Prefect off his.

-Douglas Adams (The Hithhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 105)

He turned unfathomability into an artform.

=Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 110)

Curiously enough the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew the exactly reason why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.

-Douglas Adams (The Hithhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 134)

Computer if you don’t open that exit hatch this moment I shall zap straight off to your major data banks and reprogram you with a very large ax, you got it?

-Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 137)

“Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.”

-Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 140)

Look would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?

-Douglas Adams (The Hithhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 163)

“Now see here,” said the voice,” you’re not dealing with and dumb two-bit trigger-pumping morons with low hairlines, little piggy eyes and no conversation, we’re a couple of caring guys that you’d probably quite like if you met us socially! I don’t go around gratitutiously shooting people and then bragging about it afterward in seedy space-ranger bars like some cops I could mention! I go around shooting people gratituously and then I agonize about it afterward for hours to my girlfriend!”

-Douglas Adams (The Hithhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy p 206)