The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (original 2002; edition 2005)

Please note: This rating is for all the material except the unfinished story which lends the collection its name. I decided not to read it after thinking a bit about an essay--in the first section--on the brilliance of P.G. Wodehouse: how each idea was put into words, the story assembled, the words and sentence structure refined by a mind that was so marvelously skilled at all of it and more. Yeah, he gets a bit hyperbolic, but it's understandable. The essay is less an introduction--to an unfinished book he couldn't really recommend for a Wodehouse newbie--than it's a lament for the decline and loss of a mind who played a massive role in shaping how DNA thought about language. It's a good essay. You should read it.

I've loved Douglas Adams' writing ever since 5th grade, when I was too young to get a lot of the jokes in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but old enough to laugh at the wordplay. I grew up with his writing, and now he's gone. Skipping past "The Salmon of Doubt" was quick but agonizing, and I began to reconsider...

Thank you, Richard Dawkins, for writing that lament. Many thanks to the editor who placed it at the end of the book. It was and is a perfect closing statement. Some day I'll read The Salmon, but not right now. To study how DNA wrote what he wrote? Yes. Right now, though, I just feel like celebrating the finished products of his craft.

A confession: I still haven't read any Wodehouse, and now feel (if possible)even more guilty about that sorry truth.

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DIRK GENTLY

A good enough book if you are a Douglas Adams fan (which I am); gives a good insight into the mind of the man. ( )

A collection of Adams material gathered from the remains of his hard drives. Published after his death. Some very good shorts - though the unfinished main story is just that, unfinished. Too bad. ( )

While the unfinished story can't really be commented on (Adams himself planned to abandon it and salvage the [great] ideas), the rest of the book - the collection of articles, interviews, letters and thoughts saved from his Macintosh - is amazing. Simply a great mind. His thoughts on religion often echoed my own, but were expressed in such an eloquent and humourous way. Makes me sad that I didn't read Hitchhiker's until after he'd died. ( )