The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Book Review: The Funniest Book Ever Written About the End of the World

Rating: ★★★★★

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" Book Review:

The Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur Dent, a thoroughly ordinary Englishman who was having a thoroughly terrible Thursday, escapes because his best friend Ford Prefect turns out to be an alien researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — a sort of electronic encyclopedia for budget travelers. From that point on, absolutely nothing makes sense, and absolutely everything is hilarious.

Douglas Adams wrote the funniest science fiction novel ever published. That's not hyperbole. The Hitchhiker's Guide is a book where the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42, where a sperm whale is spontaneously created miles above a planet's surface and has just enough time to contemplate its existence before impact, where a depressed robot named Marvin has a brain the size of a planet and is asked to open doors. Adams writes absurdity with such deadpan precision that you laugh not because it's silly but because it's the most logical possible response to an illogical universe.

The plot, such as it is, follows Arthur and Ford through encounters with Zaphod Beeblebrox (the two-headed President of the Galaxy who stole a ship), Trillian (the only other surviving human, who left Earth willingly at a party), and eventually to the legendary planet Magrathea, where custom planets were once built for the ultra-rich. The search for the Question to the Ultimate Answer drives what passes for narrative momentum, but Adams isn't really interested in plot. He's interested in sentences. And his sentences are perfect.

Stephen Fry narrates the audiobook, and this might be the most perfect marriage of narrator and material in the history of the format. Fry's voice IS this book. The dryness, the timing, the slight bewilderment at the universe's refusal to behave — it's as if Adams wrote every line with Fry's voice in his head.

Five stars. Don't panic.

If You Liked The Hitchhiker's Guide, Try:

• Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman — The apocalypse played for laughs, with the same conviction that the universe is absurd and that's actually kind of wonderful.

• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller — The same logic-defying absurdist humor applied to war. If Adams makes you laugh at the cosmos, Heller makes you laugh at the military.

• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers — Cozy space opera with a found family crew. Different humor, same warmth for the weird corners of the galaxy.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If this book review resonated with you, check out How to Win a Million Dollars and Shit Glitter — a memoir that shares Adams's conviction that the universe is absurd and the only rational response is to go along for the ride, tracing a queer life through Broadway, Paris, and Hawaii with the same bewildered delight at how none of it makes sense.

Learn More: How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter

How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter by Luke Stoffel