The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Book Review

Reviews Feb 24, 2019

This is a 700 page novel. And on the 30th page, the galactic hyper-way council destroys the earth to build an intergalactic highway.

Buckle your seat belts and jump into a satire-filled roller coaster ride across the universe, visiting the galactic industry that builds planets (a dude got an award for designing the coastline of Norway), the restaurant at the end of the universe (that moves back and forth the big crunch via time turbans), to meet the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who ran a computer for 7 million years to find answer to ‘Life universe and everything’ and got disappointed with its legendary answer: 42, to read the last message of God to his creation and then the God himself: a schizophrenic lonely old man with a cat in a cottage who continues to believe that the universe doesn’t exist.

This, dear fellas, is British humour at its best! Again, don’t be fooled by the movie, you would be rolling and laughing at his satire and word play at each line and be entranced by his imagination through a story that has no story. This is my effing bible and I would bring this into any conversation whenever possible. Got the book, if anyone needs.

Memorable quotes

(honestly… no single quote will do justice to this book.)

"Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out."
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."

"Why, what did she tell you?"

"I don't know, I didn't listen.
[About a band] Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath the silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.

Regular concert-goers judged that the best sound balance was usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles away from the stage, whilst the musicians themselves played their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stayed in orbit around the planet - or more frequently around a completely different planet.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.

Some fun parts

I paraphrase fun sub-stories from H2G2 all the time. I might as well add them here.

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