Back of Book Summary in a Sentence
Ford Prefect, an alien who works as a book researcher, saves his human friend Arthur Dent when the Earth gets demolished to build a galactic freeway, but he doesn’t even think about saving anyone else, and really, neither did I.
Review
This is not a comedic, sci-fi, or philosophical novel. This is the perfect trifecta of all three. I laughed, I was intrigued by talk of galactic bureaucracy, and I learned a surprising amount about life. How this happened in just a single chapter, I have no idea. Imagine what the rest of the book has in store.
Douglas Adams has a way of weaving jokes and playfulness into his sentences in a way that feels natural. Some books try to inject humor into their pages, but the jokes feel detached and forced. Adams does not suffer from this problem at all.
The main character, Arthur, is such an ordinary and unassuming man, but the situations he finds himself in are far from mundane. And he has no idea the kind of galactic adventure that’s about to be thrust upon him.
What I thoroughly enjoy about Arthur is that he interacts with stressful situations with such an effortless calmness. There are bulldozers ready to demolish his house, and he just goes about his morning routine like seeing heavy-duty construction equipment in his front yard while brushing his teeth is completely normal.
He lies in the mud in front of his porch for hours on end to prevent the bulldozers from destroying his home, and he treats it like any other everyday occurrence. He’d probably show the same emotions while getting his mail. It’s refreshing to have such an extraordinary situation treated in such an ordinary manner.
And Arthur has no idea the extent of his extraordinary situations. He thinks that Ford, one of his closest friends, is just an alcoholic out-of-work actor. But in reality, Ford is a stranded alien from a planet near Betelgeuse.
Real talk, I had to Google what Betelgeuse was. I thought it was a character from a Tim Burton movie until I realized that was Beetlejuice. Fun fact: Betelgeuse is a star in the Orion constellation and not a creepy ghost who tries to marry Winona Ryder.
I’m definitely going to read the rest of this book. Heck, I’m going to read the rest of this book series. Douglas Adams’ ability to weave the ordinary with the extraordinary is addicting.
Quotable Quote
Adams combines effective character description with even more effective humor.
There was something very slightly odd about him, but it was difficult to say what it was. Perhaps it was that his eyes didn’t seem to blink often enough and when you talked to him for any length of time your eyes began involuntarily to water on his behalf.
Get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Gwen thinks that it’s as close to magic as humans can get when a blank Word document is filled with groups of letters, and those groups of letters turn into lines, and those lines turn into a whole new world.
When Gwen isn’t reading or writing, she’s drinking boba milk tea and singing along to Steven Universe. You should sing along with her.
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