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Summary: Ricky Lyon's Book Review on The Space Hitchhiker's Guide
Review: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a very interesting order.For instance,one of the first things that happens is bulldozers flatten the main charactar's house.Then the world blows up.See?It's really cool.It's also brimming with cool guys and girls like Zaphod Beeblebrox.All in all,it is super cool.
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Summary: This book is great.
Review: This book is really good, although at sometimes it is kind of confusing, but I would still give it 5 stars. I would reccomend this book to anybody, even if you don't really like science fiction. This book has a lot of action.
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Summary: Have you read this book?
Review: This is what historians call a "classic" - at least, if we travelled into the future, it's what we will have called it. That is, if the Earth is still around.Read it before you're demolished by Vogons.
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Summary: Words are not enough...
Review: Never read a book in my life. At least, not all the way through. Sure, I have tried in the past to get interested in a book, but I've never found a book that captured me to the point that I actually finished it. I've graduated high school, and I even have a year of college under my belt, and I somehow managed to do it all without reading any of the required material from any class. Then one day in the summer of 2001, I make my regular visit to Slashdot, to find that an English fellow by the name of Douglas Adams had died. The news post had 600+ comments on it from other Slashdot readers, so I knew this was someone big, but I had never heard of him. Well I did a little bit of searching and found that he almost has a cult following, so I decided to check it out. The thought of trying to read *another* book was definitely unappealing, but so many people had so many great things to say about him and his works, so I decided to go for it. 1 month later I had finished all five books in this series, and it remains, to this day, the only book(s) I have finished completely... And I have tried diligently to find other books to capture my imagination like these books did. It's really tough to call these "books," because they are so much more than that. They all have a very unique life and soul to them... They're so warm and friendly, so comforting and relaxing... And ever so funny. It's also really hard to explain what's so darn funny about them. Adams doesn't make any punchlines, he just tells the story... But the way things work out, and the way people say things, you find yourself cracking up much more often that you'd think. I know, you're probably thinking, "The way they *say* things is funny? This is just text!" Well there's a point to that. But the other side of the story is that these characters really become a part of you, and when you're reading, you begin to act everything out in your head... You can see the people, the spaceships, the planets, the wild locations, the facial expressions... And it really starts to turn into a movie inside your head. This series of books has forever changed my life. I look at everything in a new perspective, I have a new appreciation for a lot of things (You start to realize what you've got when you read about a guy who travels through the galaxy with almost nothing except a towel), and I have an almost renewed sense of humor. I can not say enough about this wonderful series, and my only wish is that Douglas Adams were still alive so I could thank him myself for writing such an inspiring work. If you are even remotely considering purchasing this book, I would wholeheartedly urge you to give it a shot. It's only [price] for the greatest piece of literature you could ever hope to own... And if your life isn't somehow changed by this book, or the series that it belongs to, then I think you need to re-evaluate yourself; You could be missing your soul.
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Summary: Absolutely hilarious!
Review: This has to be the funniest book I have ever read. Douglas Adams' imagination is truly amazing. The storyline, characters and inconceivable situations makes this a must-read. Every time you think you've read the wackiest thing you could, you find something to top it in the next page. Even if you are not a science fiction fan, you should check out this book. The SF angle is just a back drop for a far-out comedic masterpiece.
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Summary: "Welcome to the REAL World"
Review: This book has created a global cult following. I find that the experience of having read it, connects me to so many people in such a variety of backgrounds. High school students, PhD professors, Americans, Norwegians, Buddhists and Muslims. People in Japan, in Egypt -- people in so many walks of life connect with Douglas Adams references.
It is such a great experience as a book that the world can gain Douglas Adams references. We describe the inadequacy of the administration systems in our college by talking about how the main character in Hitchhiker's Guide had gone round to see the display department. He finally found the plans in a locked lavatory with a sign that said, "Beware of Leopard."
That's the display department.
It was dark.
Well the lights had gone.
So had the stairs.
This book comically captures the world we are living it. It is a great relief from what has gone wrong with the whole modernity plan. It mocks religious conflict, overbearing leadership and failed communications. To keep your sanity in the modern world, read this book.
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Summary: Waste of Time
Review: My initial reaction to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was that Douglas Adams tries to mask the book’s sheer stupidity and lack of plot with big words and other nonsense that seem to be attempts at humor. The novel was completely devoid of plot, making the reader ready to put it down after only a few chapters. It was also rather confusing at some points and the reader is led to believe many occurrences of improbable events that are explained as intentional because of the “improbability drive” in the main characters’ space ship.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy severely lacks plot. The story focuses on the travels of four unlikely comrades and their morose robot, Marvin. The entire plot of the story can be summarized in a few sentences: The two characters from Earth get a ride on a spaceship, seconds before the Earth is destroyed, only to be kicked off of the ship into open space. Conveniently, they are picked up by a stolen ship powered by an “improbability drive”, hence the convenience of the Earthlings’ pickup.... The book is pointless and has really no theme, symbolism, or any of the elements of literature that are to be expected in a novel.
There is also surprisingly frequent use of common grammatical errors such as missing commas, misplaced modifiers, and sentence fragments. The grammar in the book makes it hard to respect the author much for his writing ability. There also seems to be large words used where they are unnecessary that just seem to be attempts to make the book seem better and the author smarter.
One thing I liked about the book was the author’s use of the character Marvin, the eternally depressed robot programmed only to make lives miserable. Although Marvin was rather annoying, he accurately represents and criticizes people who act very much like him. Marvin was so depressing in fact that he saved the heroes lives by talking to another machine, making it feel compelled to kill itself. Obviously, Marvin is an exaggeration of people who only see the bad side of things, but he still brought forth thoughts of how people could be like that.
Overall, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was a rather poor piece of literature that seemed to be more of a waste of time than an enjoyable novel. Douglas Adams shadows some aspects of the real world, but the poor writing, lack of plot, and undeveloped characters made the book less interesting and made it harder to notice a theme or relation to my life.
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Summary: really good book
Review: over all i think that this was a really good book. it was funny and kept you reading. i would recomend it to amyone
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Summary: Wild and Zany Ride . . .
Review: I have heard so many references to this book recently that I had put it on my list of books to fill in between the more challenging reading I have to do. The last straw was when a visiting minister to our pulpit used this guide as a jumping of point to explaining the our religious practices to newcomers. So of to the on-line store and soon this nifty little volume was at my doorstep. What a blast! The antics of Arthur Dent and Ford Perfect are so zany that they have to make you chuckle if not laugh outright. And the perpetually sad robot, Marvin, infuriates the reader as quickly as the other characters in the book. So if you want a break and a thoroughly enjoyable romp through the Universe, this is the best place to start. I'm bound to pick up the rest in this series in order to continue to partake in this dry English humor.
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Summary: Fantastic Scifi-Comedy
Review: There's not a lot you can't say about the series of science-fiction/comedy books [and the miniseries] left by the late, great Douglas N. Adams. I think it's this book that really makes me laugh still, the most. The others in the series are fantastic in their own rights, but this book is the one I can go back to, any time, and still laugh at. It's just so absurd that you never get used to it the way you can with some other books in the genre. For example in the Red Dwarf books, you begin to accept the quirks of Lister and Rimmer and the crew, but you really start to laugh at them because it's just SO Rimmer to do whatever or say whatever. It begins to get, in all fairness, a little less funny, and a little old. But DNA's silliness never seems to lose its sharp cutting edge. The characters, too, always feel new, though eventually you start to see all of them, even Vogons, as friends in a way, like you know them a lot, and you like them. This is a book that changed my life, in a number of ways, and has kept me laughing for many years.
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