I'm a little more than halfway through And Another Thing...
And…I don’t know how to say this. So. I’ll just say it.
I don’t hate it.
(Yes, that much buildup for a largely ambiguous statement. Let me Spillane.)
I keep marking things I like and things I don’t like, and the only thing I outright don’t like is this (p. 9 in the U.S. hardcover edition):
What would his obituary say in the Hitchhiker’s Guide? Ford wondered. It would be brief, that was for sure. A couple of words. Perhaps the same two words he had used to describe Earth all those years ago.
Mostly harmless.
I’m picking nits, probably, but it’s pretty well known going back to the first book in this series that Ford spent years on Earth researching the place for his Guide article, submitted something of considerable length, and later, it was cut down to “mostly harmless” for space reasons.
Or maybe I’m not picking nits, since if you’re going to write a damn book for this series, you should probably know where “mostly harmless” came from.
But that’s okay, because a few things have made me laugh out loud. Page 111 (not that context helps in a book this weird, but Zaphod is in Asgard, the home of the gods in Norse mythology, on a mission, and he is about to embark on a challenge before Heimdall lets him visit with Thor):
Heimdall adopted a heroic stance, which is not easy when one is clad in a garish ski suit, but in fairness the god carried it off. He raised his horn and blew a long, undulating series of notes that sounded suspiciously like the old Betelgeusean nursery rhyme “Arkle Schmarkle Sat on a Schmed,” but with a semitone more implied violence.
Page 142 (Zaphod is trying to make his way down to Thor’s hiding place):
There was a customs Viking in a reinforced booth who seemed a little surprised to see a mortal coming onto the platform. In fact, he was so surprised that his eyes popped right out of their sockets.
“Whoa,” said Zaphod. “That is truly disgusting. Can you do it again?”
“No, I cannot,” said the Viking, twisting the eyes back in. “Who the Hel are you?”
(Don’t ask, I just laughed at it and stuck a Post-It on it. Or, yes, you can ask — Hel is both a place in Norse mythology and the name of its ruler. And for what it’s worth, they had mentioned Hel earlier in this subplot. I don’t have a working knowledge of Viking fairy tales.)
There are really only a few things I absolutely cannot abide, namely Random (who is Douglas’s fault, so I can’t really blame Colfer for the fact that she’s insufferable), the return of Fenchurch in the form of a computer that Arthur has so far become obsessed with (like, way to bring back THE WORST BOOK IN THE SERIES — we’ll see how that goes), and something else that I’m not going to talk about on the off chance that someone wants to read this book with as few spoilers as possible.
Honestly, it’s no better or worse than Mostly Harmless, which I just re-read on Sunday night before reading this. And that’s pretty high praise, considering I was expecting to loathe it.
I’ll let you know if I learn to loathe it by the time it ends.
I'm sorry, things keep cracking me up, sounding like things I would say.
Old Thrashbarg regarded him gravely. His old gray eyes moved sadly. He held his arms aloft, one still carrying a bobbing pikka bird, the other his staff.
“O Sandwich Maker from Bob!” he pronounced. He paused, furrowed his brow and sighed as he closed his eyes in pious contemplation. “Life,” he said, “will be a very great deal less weird without you!”
Arthur was stunned.
“Do you know,” he said, “I think that’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said to me?”
—Mostly Harmless
Sometimes my friends make me feel that way, too, Arthur.
Arthur put his head in his hands and shook it gently from side to side.
“Is there any humane way,” he moaned, “in which I can prevent you from telling me what temporary reverse bloody-whatsiting is?”
“No,” said Ford, “because your daughter is caught up in the middle of it and it is deadly, deadly serious.”
Thunder rolled in the pause.
“All right,” said Arthur. “Tell me.”
“I leapt out of a high-rise office window.”
This cheered Arthur up.
“Oh!” he said. “Why don’t you do it again?”
“I did.”
“Hmmmm,” said Arthur, disappointed. “Obviously no good came of it.”
—Mostly Harmless
P.S. Well, not that way, really. ;)
Reblog with the first line of your favourite book
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
reblogged from downinpockets
These books are coming out this fall. I am both excited to read them and terrified of what’s in them.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is my favorite book series, ever. I read the first book in seventh grade. Most of it went over my head — I was born almost exactly seven years after it was published, I was 12 when I read it, and I’m not British — but there are some things that even a preteen American can get out of this book. Laughs, mostly.
“Ford, you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.”
I read the rest of the series in ninth grade after receiving an omnibus edition for Christmas. Despite my love for it, I’ve only read through the whole series once. I hated So Long and Thanks for All the Fish so much that I can’t bear to read it again, and I’m incredibly anal, so I’ve never felt like reading Mostly Harmless without reading So Long and Thanks before it. I suppose it’s reasonable that the fourth part of a trilogy would be nearly unreadable, eh?
Now this book is coming out and I have to actually read the whole thing again. I’m dreading So Long and Thanks a lot less than I am what might be in And Another Thing…. Although Colfer grew up reading the Hitchhiker books, and loves them, and although Adams’s widow Jane Belson gave her blessing for this book to be written, and although Adams himself aways said he wanted to add a sixth book because he didn’t like how it ended in Mostly Harmless…it won’t be the same, and I’m afraid it will be too different.
I do think, as a fan, Colfer will be able to write the characters well, and I think if new characters are introduced, they will be believable and unbelievable at the same time, the way they were when Adams introduced new characters. What I fear is not being able to hear Adams’s voice and sense of humor in the narration. He had a particular way of writing. I’ve read the Dirk Gently books and The Salmon of Doubt on top of the Hitchhiker books, and his voice is present in all of it. I’m afraid of going through a Hitchhiker book without that.
Mostly, though, I’m excited about And Another Thing…, because I’ve lost my taste for fiction and I’m looking to get it back. A familiar face, even with a different voice, will go a long way, I think.
The Crichton book, however, terrifies me more than it intrigues me. It will be the same voice; he had finished it before he died. And that is actually what scares me most. I’ve read every single one of his novels, including the ones he wrote under a pseudonym, and I read Travels. Up through Timeline, I found them basically flawless — very good reads, well-researched, with science and technology that was logical enough to be believable, if often impossible, plus characters that were worth the effort.
Then Prey came out. I read it. I finished it. I put it aside and asked no one in particular, “What the fuck was that?!” I only read it once, not long after it came out, and I remember little of the details, so I can’t give you a reasonable account of what exactly made me react like that. I still have my copy, but if you think I’m reading it again, you’re insane. A friend of mine in high school was also a Crichton fan and her review of the book went like this: “Has the man no friends to tell him when something sucks?”
Then State of Fear came out. I started it. I never finished it. The page where I left off is still marked in my copy after five years. I absolutely never give up on books halfway through, but I couldn’t finish reading this book. It’s about global warming, if I remember correctly, and once again, I can’t tell you exactly what turned me off. I think part of it, for this book and for Prey, was it lacked the plausibility that all his previous technological thrillers had. Something about State of Fear in particular struck me as half-assed, and I wasn’t going to waste my time on something I felt was poorly produced.
Because of my reaction to these two books, I never read Next, which is the last book of his that was published before he died. You can find hardcover editions of Next on sale for, like, five dollars these days, in the bargain sections of many major bookstores, and yet I still never picked it up. Until last week, anyway. I borrowed it from the library. (I am still not spending five dollars on it.) It’s been on my desk ever since because I’m afraid to read it. But read it I will…eventually…
Pirate Latitudes is, according to the publisher, in the same vein as The Great Train Robbery and, therefore, I assume Eaters of the Dead, in the sense that they’re historical fiction. I think that might be a good way to ease back into Crichton as well, because it means he’s writing about something I have absolutely no knowledge of (piracy in the Caribbean in the 1600s) and I therefore have no immediate basis for a “what the fuck” reaction. I could still have one anyway, of course, but I can’t go into it with the same apprehension with which I approach Next.
I’m going to buy and read both of these, and if I never read another novel again, you’ll know why.
