Hysterical. If you liked The Hitchhiker's Guide but thought it could do with fewer spaceships, try this. If you're shaking your head in bafflement, thinking "Fewer spaceships? Do you want to ruin the whole thing, woman?" try this. If you've never read any Douglas Adams at all, try this. If you like things that are good, try this. On the other hand, I am pretty sure my best friend hated it, and she does often like things that are good, so maybe it's not for everyone. But try it anyway."He was rou...

‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ is completely absurd. If you have read other books by Douglas Adams, like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, gentle reader, it is helpful to know that all of Adams' books, including this one, are hilariously ridiculous and impossible. The characters and the plots are played entirely for laughs, puns, jokes and satire. Oh, and usually some of the known aspects of quantum physics and Einstein's relativity theories drive the action endured by Adams’ most...

I recently watched the pilot episode of Dirk Gently and loved it. So, naturally, I picked up the book. Now this order of doing things is often frowned upon by many people, including me, but sometimes things just happen. The reason I'm telling you this is that I was slightly let down by the book, having seen (a version of) Dirk Gently in action before reading about him. There just wasn't enough of the detective in the book, while he (both versions) is such an interesting character. And yes, it wa...

I enjoyed the TV show, especially the first season and based on that experience, I wanted to read the book. I'm just glad I've watched the show first because if had read the book first, I probably wouldn't have bothered with the show.

Adams, author of the bafflingly popular The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series as well as this whimsical genre-buster and its sequel, seems to have mastered the oximoronic art of writing funny books that are actually not very funny at all. There are some wacky English characters who fall somewhere on a spectrum between Jeeves and Fat Charlie's brother Spider, and an unusual plot which plods along aimlessly and manages to make 260 pages feel like 1000, and you may smirk a couple of times but...

Infinitely dull for long stretches, punctuated by brief flashes of humor and incomprehensibility, with an ending that's fairly amusing. Time well spent? No, not really. Recommended for lovers of dry British humor that can stomach even the driest of Monty Python sketches.

To prove the theory of the interconnectedness of everything I´ll grant 3½-4, possibly 4½ star. I have learned a lot. How the dodos became extinct, how to computer simulate the movements of a sofa while it gets stuck in a stairway and how an abacus can work in mysterious ways.Not least have I come to know the origin of the albatros in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a thing that has puzzled me for billions of years.I´m still very much in doubt when it comes to the death of Gordon Way, but it jus...

It's all about the couch.Allow me to elucidate. Doug Adams book. Funny? Sure. Satirical? Check. But would you have guessed intricately plotted?Adams, who practically invented the vein of British literary humor now being minted hand-over-fist by Terry Pratchett, is in fine form with this novel, his major work outside the Hitchhiker's universe. We get the same bumbling protaginsts, the gently affable quasi-villain, the apocalyptic-threat-which-is-not-a-threat, the deft one-sentence-paragraph narra...

Robot monks, ghosts, murder and add a bit of The Doctor. But since it is Douglas Adams, don't forget the towel.

In Xanadu did Kubla KahnA science fiction book decreeWith plot purloined from Doctor WhoA cross between a witches' brewAnd a nice cup of tea.So several chapters serially were wroteUntil the text was finished, good and wholeA sovereign remedy or antidoteAgainst the long dark teatime of the soulAnd there were geeks who answered alien prayersWhile moving house accompanied by their boxes And there were sofas stuck upon the stairsIn curious angles causing paradoxes.But oh! the changes made to history...

I still don't really understand how the ending of this book worked, and trying to describe the plot would be like trying to build a submarine out of cheese. Instead, I'll just share some quotes from this book that I especially loved, because Douglas Adams is the only author in the history of the world who is capable of creating them."'A horse?' he said again. 'Yes, it is,' said the Professor. 'Wait - ' he motioned to Richard, who was about to go out again and investigate - 'Let it be. It won't b...

Is it an audacious thing to say that Mr. Douglas Adams is hit or miss?Yes. (Well, & "audacious" not really.)Good. Here is a fun (and I mean FUN) book, rife with what is absurd and comical in certain sciences that dictate what the world is--I know my math teacher in high school was mad about him. And it does seem as though there is an intended niche audience already built for this type of literature: more literary than, say, Piers Anthony but not character-driven, nor truly dearly dramatic. There...

I last read this when I was really young and was shortly getting off a fantastic kick of HHGttG wanting MORE, as, I assume, most people do when they get on a Douglas Adams kick.Like the other series, every page is filled with wonderfully witty and fascinating and wise (crack) quotes that will delight and amaze and generally blow most writing away by the sheer audacity.To think that Douglas Adams never considered himself a writer! Truly amazing. And of course us fans just snicker at that and keep...

I discovered Douglas Adams by coincidence. I found his book Last Chance to See, co-written by Mark Cawardine, about animals near extinction and Douglas' and Mark's trip around the world to see some of them, in a box with "Mängelexemplare" (old books, sometimes not in top condition that are therefore sold at a reduced price). His humour stood out even in the German translation and when I told a friend about it, she told me all about an odd-sounding story about a guy hitchhiking across the galaxy

“He instituted this Chair of Chronology to see if there was any particular reason why one thing happened after another and if there was any way of stopping it. Since the answers to the three questions were, I knew immediately, yes, no, and maybe, I realised I could then take the rest of my career off.”Books by Oscar Wilde, Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams have (at least) one thing in common. I can easily pick funny, witty, interesting quotes from every page. The above quote represents Adams’...

The concept of putting as many ideas as possible in as less book space as imaginable worked well for the hitchhiker, but in this case, it was too much, no I mean, less.It could have been an epic milestone like the ingenious hitchhiker series, but it is simply too short and too densely packed at the same time, it´s a miracle how this is even possible. The characters and main plots could have been used for one much longer or two short books and it would have been a masterpiece again. More details

Douglas Adams' underated masterpiece leads Dirk Gently from a search for a missing cat to unlocking the secrets of time travel and saving the human race from total extinction. I thought no-one could write a better comic novel than 'The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' until I first read this. I've subsequently re-read this novel countless times and it never fails to entertain, I'm still finding references to literature and popular culture that I've previously missed. That a novel can be re-rea...

I am a firm believer that a bit of British humor is good for the soul...And I am quite American, in case you did not know... “Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see?” Douglas Adams has a highly quotable, laugh out loud writing style which I adore; I seem to remember a blurb describing this book a...

From the title you would think this is possibly about a detective agency. Well there is an agency but they don’t detect things in the normal matter. You should probably guess that since it is a Douglas Adams book and when has he written anything really normal (I mean that in the best way).Nope for this book “Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” There is craziness, absurdity, the interc...

I love this book. I love it far, far more than is in any way reasonable. It is possibly Douglas Adams' strangest work, and it is far and away my favorite. It makes almost no sense unless you read it twice or more. And a good knowledge of the content and historical context of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is essentially required to understand many of the jokes and much of the plot.Because, as it turns out, the linchpin upon which history turns, upon whic...