Rating: 
Summary: So funny, so clever
Review: Douglas Adams has a unique wit that many people will find hilarious. Others may find it hard to comprehend what he is talking about. But intelligent people will enjoy this book for its clever take on the way the earth works (before it is demolished). An example of Adams's wit: one of my favorite analogies is when he describes going into hyperspace: one character says it's a little bit like "being drunk." When another character asks "what's so bad about being drunk?" the reply is: "Ask a glass of water." This is the kind of clever stuff you will find all throughout this enormous volume which you will not be able to put down. You don't have to be a sci-fi fan to love this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A Review of this Edition, not the contents
Review: I don't know if I'll be annoying Amazon or not by this review but I bought this edition of the Hitch-Hikers Guide because I keep losing all the others that I've bought. If you want a review of the actual story then read the other reviews: I agree 100% that it's fabulous. However, if you want to own the books, then I suggest that you don't buy this omnibus edition. The extra features aren't all that fantastic and it's printed on low-quality paper. Have a look around for the other editions that are available and buy one of them, or buy each book individually. On the other hand, you might end up like me: lending out all your copies to friends because it's fantastic and eventually losing them all. Oh well, the only thing nicer than a brand new book without a single crease is a dog-eared relic that's been read by tens of people 20 times over. Enjoy.
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Summary: 42 Is the answer. What is the Question?
Review: This heading may seem strange, but the book is even stranger. I ques the introduction by Douglas says it all. The whole idea is simple and straightforward: "What if there would be a book like France for 2 dollars a day, that would guide you trough the univers.
This book tells you just that and also makes a point about the fact that the univers is a stranger place then you or I could ever imagine.
Time travel, travel at the speed of chance, travel to all kinds of strange places, like the place, where the universe stops to exist. All is possible in this book, including a manicaly depressed robot with a brain the size of a planet, who eventualy lives about 7 times longer as the univers exists. Yes this book is strange and it makes you wonder about reality. Science fiction without the ussual batles and wars. Not that the universe is peacefull, but you just happen to stumble past all the big problems and live with the huge problems a person can have.....
Rating:
Summary: much that is apocryphal or at least wildly inaccurate
Review: Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series will, for certain readers, represent an epiphany of the sort caused elsewhere (but in the same sorts of people) only by Monty Python and Pink Floyd. Generally speaking, if you know all the lyrics to Animals, can quote the dead parrot sketch and can hum David Gilmour's guitar solos, you will be able to recite the titles of all Oolon Colluphid's groundbreaking metaphysical tracts about God, too. Yes, you. You know who you are. I have a few complaints about the way it all ends up, but I better get in the bouquets while the going is good: all my quibbling below is not to detract from the fact that the original instalment, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, is one of the wittiest books ever written - the combination of a solid science fiction grounding (Adams scriptwrote for Doctor Who) and dead-eye observations about the collision of the British way of life with the Nineteen Seventies, make this little book one of the genuine cultural artefacts of the past century. Nevertheless, and rather as it has for Floyd and Python, universal admiration for Adams (recently deceased) and the first book has tended to cloud the collective judgment as far as the rest of the series is concerned. While Adams is clearly a master of the dead-ball, the entire package is a pretty tiring affair, as if it were a good idea which ran out of steam about halfway through. Which, according to Adams himself, it was. If you read even the first three stories back to back a few things begin to emerge. Firstly, the original (and undeniably brilliant) premise has completely evaporated by the end of the second book. Until this point the story drifts from set piece to set piece, but is guided fairly firmly by the central quest. When this runs out of gas, the linear narrative disappears, and the characters drift pointlessly between scenes with no apparent connection. What starts out as a clever concept album ends up as a sketch show. As long as the sketches are funny this is ok, if not necessarily ideal. But they too begin to run out of steam. Whenever Adams needs to restore a semblance of continuity, he reintroduces Marvin the Paranoid Android, who turns up having been stuck somewhere for millions of years (waiting to save the author's bacon?): no bad thing, as Marvin is the most enjoyable character of the lot. Adams obviously realised the mess he'd created by the end of Life, The Universe and Everything: So Long and Thanks For All The Fish is an attempt to pull everything back together. Alas, it's wholly unsuccessful. So unsuccessful, in fact, that Adams felt obliged to have another go at the same job in Mostly Harmless, and was equally unsuccessful second time round. After a time you also begin to realise that Adams' famously brilliant writing style consists largely of taking figures of speech and deliberately subverting them - a technique which after a while, to paraphrase it, more or less exactly fails to please the eye. By So Long..., Adams is rather arch about the whole affair - consciously introducing "the chronicler" into proceedings and on one occasion (not a little arrogantly) telling readers to re-read a seemingly incomprehensible sentence, until it is understood. The series certainly gave him the chance to work on his storytelling, and the results are plain to see from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, which is a superbly plotted, focussed and realised story. But, rather like his characters, for the most part in this Series Adams flounders around with the Answer, but never really gets to grips with the Question. Mostly Harmless.
Rating:
Summary: Indispensable
Review: I don't know how often I have read these 5 books, and I am still amazed by Adams's wit. His ideas about life, the universe and everything else are still influential and will never cease to be quoted in real life.
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Summary: Too funny for this world
Review: Comedy is so much more likely to succeed in movies than in novel form. So there is that much more reason to celebrate good comedy novels. Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series started out as a radio serial, then went to book and was finally made into a television series. I even hear it may see the big screen soon. For me, the best format so far is the novels. Adams writes well, has a fertile and sometimes bizarre imagination, peoples his stories with self-absorbed characters and isn't afraid to make the central hero a pessimistic boor. There has been science fiction comedy before this but Adams has earned the crown for the best Sci-Fi satirist, in my opinion at least. This five-book trilogy revolves around Arthur Dent, supposedly a typical English loser. Poor Arthur gets thrown into one difficult situation after another, not because he is in any way special, but because his best friend, Ford Prefect, happens to be an alien reporter for the most popular book in the history of the universe, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Ford saves Arthur from Earth's immanent destruction, thus derailing Arthur's equilibrium. He doesn't regain his balance until four books later when he falls in love. Adams is the modern day Oscar Wilde or P. G. Woodhouse. His dialogue is so witty and surprising, that when I first read these books it was impossible to hold in my laughter. And it's not just the occasional quip, sprinkled into an otherwise standard tale; the whole thing tends to build into a crescendo that is almost too funny to bear. I've read this series so many times I've almost memorised each word. Don't miss out on some of the funniest writing to be seen in the last 50 years.
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Summary: Wonderful series
Review: Review of first book in the series: Overall: Spectacular fun. A plot that makes up for its lack of believability / lack of development with the sheer volume of its ideas and its droll British humor. We follow along with the persistently boggled Arthur Dent and along the way find out how to mix a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything, and the true purpose of both little white mice and the Earth. What more can you ask for? As a cult classic, it falls firmly into the "you love it or you hate it" category. This first book in the series presents an easy way to spend a few hours with a quick paperback and determine which category you fall into. If you love it, there's 4 more books and a few other Adams works to explore; if you fall into the "hate it" category you've only lost a few hours (though apparently at some previous point in time you lost your soul, but oh well).
Rating:
Summary: Share and Enjoy
Review: Simply the best book in the history of the universe, I don't know what I would do without Douglas Adams' drool, sardonic wit ever close to my heart.
Rating:
Summary: The Greatest
Review: Douglas Adams may have been the greatest writer in English since Shakespeare. Certainly he was the greatest English humorist since Noel Coward. I've read everything of his that I can find. The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide has given me more reading enjoyment than probably any other book I've read. Adams' premature death deprives us of one of the greatest wits ever to string together a sentence in the English language.
Rating:
Summary: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Review: I still use lines from this book in common day speech. The thing that I like about this book is that Douglas Adams has us believe that interstellar space travel is common place. The images that he evokes are much larger than life. How can you give so much importance to a Towel and the number 42? HMMM? I love it though, well worth the long read.
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