The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story… (edition 2005)

Douglas Adams has been a favorite ever since I happened upon HITCHHIKER'S as a teenager. Within these pages lie whimsy and adventure - a mix of quick wit and serious thought. Some of my favorite quotes come from this collection, and my only regret is Adams untimely demise.
Not since, on my journey of hundreds of books, have I ever found one that captured and stayed with me so completely.

Although difficult to synopsize, the tales that await you span a galaxy of imagination. There is a restaurant at the end of the universe for weary travelers; There are doplhins who take leave of Earth with foreboding. A plethora of characters dance around each other on a quest to find the meaning of it all (don't be disappointed with the answer to that by the way).

As science fiction HITCHHIKER'S is no doubt a classic. Space travel, aliens, and futuristic technology bend the mind in a way not common when this was released. I am still hard-pressed to find a series or novel to hold a candle. Happy reading, and don't forget your towel! ( )

I liked Mostly Harmless. The others felt really slow-going. ( )

I enjoyed the first couple of books, but I disliked the way the last book ended -- it made the rest of the series seem really, pretty pointless. The books got less funny as they went along, too. ( )

Since then I've read this novel at least a half dozen times and it never ceases to make me smile. Through the fictional notion of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (A tablet-like guidebook for interstellar travelers), Adams prophesied the advent of the Internet, the e-reader, tablets, smart phones... or at the very least, Wikipedia. The Babel Fish imagined in the novel predated translation software (one program that actually bears the name Babel fish, in fact) and we are probably less than a decade away from very practical translation apps that will be able to instantly translate any language into any other language at conversation speed. Hell, Adams predicted (almost to the exact spelling, Google. And he did it with such ease that it seemed as though he were blindfolded with his hands tied behind his back. With such accuracy one might require three pints of bitter to soften the mental blow of his awesomeness.

On a more serious note, Adams was the first author I ever read that put a fine point on many of the questions I had about religion. I've been an atheist since I can remember. The way gay people say they've always known they were gay, that's me except with atheism. My family wasn't particularly devout, but they were church going people. But as far back as I can remember I found the entire ordeal of church, the rituals the forced (to me, anyway) joy and the stories to be deeply unsettling and, at times, creepy. It was Adams through the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that made me realize that I wasn't the only one who thought everyone around me was taking crazy pills. I credit Adams for allowing me to be unapologetically atheist. It's made my spiritual life a lot easier to reconcile.

To read the rest for this review visit my blog: http://www.taiwaneastcoaster.blogspot.tw/2013/04/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-galaxy... ( )

Gave this compendium to my daughter for her birthday, but she overloaded in book2. So I'm thinking this might not be the best way to introduce a newbie to the series.

Recommend as a gift for a friend who regrets donating their copies of the books to their local lib. (You might want to include a towel with the gift...just in case.) ( )