Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

This is the story of a human named Arthur Dent, a simple ape descendant who no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company.

He wakes up one morning to find bulldozers ready to knock down his house to make way for a bypass. His friend Ford Prefect – who is not a human, but an alien from the vicinity of Betelgeuse – saves him a few minutes later from the earth’s explosion, which was destroyed (ironically) to make way for a Hyperspace Expressway. And here they embark on an adventure across the galaxies, updating the most complete encyclopedia known to the universe: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This handy little book is used to explain the world around our two protagonists as they travel.

Douglas Adams described his story as a five-part trilogy, divided as such:

• The Primary Phase
• The Secondary Phase
• The Tertiary Phase
• The Quandary Phase
• The Quintessential Phase

However H2G2 (short for HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) isn’t a book originally. It was first broadcasted as an audiobook on BBC Radio with great voice actors and excellent sound effects, which really plunge the listener in this mad world. The radio show was then adapted into five books by Adams himself, and recently a movie was released with Martin Freeman playing Arthur Dent. I recommend you listen to the audiobook first, because it really embodies the original idea of Douglas Adams, with a very well recreated atmosphere thanks to sound effects and a different voice for each character. It also enables you to play with your imagination, making it even weirder and funnier when something improbable happens (which is often).

In fact, this is the aim of this story: to be improbable, random and extremely funny. Adams is very smart and makes you laugh every twenty seconds while maintaining a great overall story. There are an incredible number of quotes to get from this book such as: “Time is an illusion, Lunchtime doubly so” or “- What’s so unpleasant about being drunk? – You ask a glass of water”. The audiobooks and the books become addictive very quickly as they search out for answers about the universe, the meaning of life, and god’s last message.

What I find very surprising about this story, is that the narrator has an intergalactic basis of life, and it comes as little surprise when he say seas are pink. This gives a new dimension of Arthur moving in an unknown but real world. If you like science fiction and laughing continually you'll love every bit of it.