Friday 3 September 2010

Top 5 books by Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams made a big impact on my world view as a teenager. I think he'd still make my top five favourite authors. I know these books are not great literature (something my A-Level English teacher was very quick to point out when I included them on a list of my favourite books!) but they make me laugh and taught me more about life than Tess of the bloody D'Urbervilles ever did. I've just finished the sixth book in the Hitchhiker's trilogy. It wasn't written by Douglas for obvious reasons (he's dead if you didn't know, but had he been alive it wouldn't have been written by him due to his failure to ever comply with a publishing deadline) but Eoin Colfer (author of the excellent Artemis Fowl series) has done a brilliant job of writing in the Adams style.

I read the two original Hitchhiker's books after seeing the BBC TV series and have been hooked ever since. "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish" was the fourth book which I think prefer over the busier "Life, The Universe & Everything" and the bleaker "Mostly Harmless". Douglas wrote two Dirk Gently novels which provided the same quality of humour but free of the Hitchhiker's situational limitations. Finally "The Meaning of Liff" was a joint effort with John Lloyd, providing alternative meanings for town names in Britain.

1. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

2. The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe

3. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

4. So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish

5. The Meaning Of Liff

In the unlikely event that my old English teacher is reading this, I have expanded my reading knowledge over the years but these are still some of my favourite books.

3 comments:

Ma-Kun said...

HEY! I like these 5 books ,too!
I think they are great!

Shom Biswas said...

Last Chance to See. Very different from everything else he wrote, and an absolute masterpiece. The kind of book that, like the topic he writes about, is hardly ever written about by a major popular writer (and not in a Michael Lewis way).

Chopper said...

I agree. Last Chance is a great book. I enjoyed the TV series Mark Cawardine did with Stephen Fry too.