Friday, July 3, 2009

Mostly Harmless


Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
(Hitchhiker's Guide Series #5)
originally published in 1992
My copy was a trade paperback, 277 pages
ISBN-13: 9780345418777
recommended

From the Publisher
It’s easy to get disheartened when your planet has been blown up, the woman you love has vanished due to a misunderstanding about space/time, the spaceship you are on crashes on a remote and Bob-fearing planet, and all you have to fall back on are a few simple sandwich-making skills. However, instead of being disheartened, Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life a bit–and immediately all hell breaks loose.
Hell takes a number of forms: there’s the standard Ford Prefect version, in the shape of an all-new edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and a totally unexpected manifestation in the form of a teenage girl who startles Arthur Dent by being his daughter when he didn’t even know he had one.
Can Arthur save the Earth from total multidimensional obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter, Random, from herself? Of course not. He never works out exactly what is going on. Will you?
My thoughts:

This book ends the series as "the fifth in the increasingly inaccurate named Hitchhiker's Trilogy" and this is the one book I had not previously read before (and do not own in the original paperback). A couple thoughts immediately spring to mind. First, although I'm glad I did it, I have hitchhiker's burnout. Additionally, I still think the first book was the best. Mostly Harmless is a fine effort and ends the series. Written so long after the others, Mostly Harmless didn't quite have the same tone. Remember to read the books in order if you are planning to read the series. Douglas Adams (March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001) died at age 49 from a heart attack.
Recommended - especially if you're reading the whole series.

Quotes:

The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have gotten a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway. opening

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living....It will even live in New York, though it's hard to know why. In the wintertime the temperature falls well below the legal minimum, or rather it would do if anyone had the common sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79. pg. 17

She was a rapidly rising anchor. she had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn't care. Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else in life becomes eerily easy. pg. 19

"You seem very angry and unhappy about something to do with stars and planets when we were having our discussion, and it's been bothering me, which is why I came to see if you were all right." pg. 31

...she reflected that if there was one thing life had taught her, it was that there are some times when you do not go back for your bag and other times when you do. It had yet to teach her to distinguish between the two types of occasions. pg. 39

2 comments:

Deb Nance at Readerbuzz said...

The few times I have tried to read all the books in a series, in order, I have felt burnout, too.

Lori L said...

I hear you Deb... I will never do this again, LOL!, but it was worth a one time marathon.