I loved this book back in the 1990s when I first read it. I even went so far as to buy a big collection of the whole series, and enjoyed the hell out of it. But I gave it to a friend, so it had been over twenty years since I had read this book, when I picked it up recently for a review!
The version I got was the Illustrated Edition, with a good collection of drawings by Chris Riddell. They are detailed and distorted in a fun way, with many thin lines. They're imaginative while still fitting fairly well with the descriptions Adams wrote in the book.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a great classic of satirical science fiction, and a must-read for anyone who likes that genre, or even most of those who don't. Unless you have some kind of smouldering distaste for British humour, you'll like this book.
It's full of extended, silly descriptions that hit you repeatedly with funny little jabs, lots of convenient and inconvenient items, names, and places, silly logic laid like a lacquer over fun philosophy, straight-up jokes, and many "deliberate" misunderstandings.
The story begins with Arthur Dent finding his house is going to be demolished. The "notice" was posted somewhere silly, in a clever poke at bureaucracy. While he's blocking bulldozers with his body, his old friend Ford Prefect (a pun) tells him to follow him to a bar. Turns out the same situation Arthur's facing is about to hit the whole Earth.
They hitchhike onto an alien ship, and thus begins a fun and ridiculous adventure where Improbability takes the wheel.
If you've seen the 2005 movie or any of the other film adaptations, I'd highly recommend the book anyway. A lot of the funny stuff in this book is there in a way that I think would be hard to adapt to film without undue clunkiness.
The book is short and fun. The first half suffers from a bit of a dark tone that evaporates, or rather coagulates (onto a specific character) later in the story. After that, it's a smooth ride and an enjoyable one.
For more detail and some spoilers, feel free to watch the embedded video.
Check it out here:
https://a.co/d/4hDnNpX
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