Bibliography
Recommend a title for bookclub
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- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980
- Life, the Universe and Everything, 1982
- So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, 1984
- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, 1987
- Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul , 1988
- Last Chance to See, 1990
- Mostly Harmless, 1992
- The Salmon of Doubt, 1995
A Good Place To Start
| Title | Votes | |
|---|---|---|
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | 15 | |
| Last Chance to See | 1 | |
| Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency | 1 |
A Bad Place To Start
| Title | Votes | |
|---|---|---|
| Mostly Harmless | 6 | |
| Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul | 1 | |
| Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency | 1 | |
| The Salmon of Doubt | 1 |
Genres
Categorization is odious. There is tremendous overlap among genres. These pigeonholes are offered only as a convenience.
Douglas Adams
added by ginger
Comments
Please consider recommending where to begin reading this author, or where not to. A few words about your experiences reading this author and why you make the recommendations you do will be helpful to other users. If you are the author or have studied this author extensively, please say so.
Warning: Read this book only where you are able to laugh out loud.
dropo59 January 31st, 2006 03:39 PM PST
If you are not really into science fiction or fantasy and don't think you'd like Douglas Adams, you should read Adams's great nonfiction book (written with Mark Carwardine) called Last Chance to See. It's about travels that Adams and Carwardine made to see endangered animals in the wild. It's beautifully-written and beautifully-thought-out, as well as very funny in Adams's typical mode.
Marian March 3rd, 2006 07:34 PM PST
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was originally a RADIO program (or rather, programme) on the BBC (1978). All other forms (novels, television series, audiobooks, and the movie) are lesser achievements. The BBC recently taped radio versions of the further adventures of Arthur Dent, completing the Hitchhiker series -- and that means the whole thing is or soon will be available on CD. That is THE WAY to experience it.
mkiker2089 May 1st, 2006 10:34 PM PST
I wouldn't call the book a lesser, but it is different. The book is in a way what Adams whished the radio play could have been. It's longer, the ideas are smoothed out, and it's order has been changed to make the stories flow better. That asside the radio plays are great and should be enjoyed after the book. I say after because you'll apreciate the changes better that way, then see the TV show, the movie and play the text based game.
You can get the complete set from Amazon.co.uk with all five volumes in one box set. The radio plays are musts for any Adams fan and are unfortunatly overlooked by far to many of them.
sstair March 15th, 2006 12:14 AM PST
While I enjoyed the Hitchhiker's series, I found the Dirk Gently books to be even better. The stories seem to be less disjointed - they don't jump around as much, and stick to a more straightforward storyline. Not that I'm suggesting that the Dirk Gently books are in any way predictable. Far from it, but I think they might be a better starting point for Adams's work.
mkiker2089 June 1st, 2006 10:04 PM PST
I'm going to say read Hitchhiker's first, then the Dirk Gently novels, then continue with the Hitchhiker's series. The Dirk Gently novels are very different from the Hitchhiker's series so I think breaking it up will give you a quicker feel for the total Adams experience.
Don't forget that the radio plays are available and are excellent. Not the audio books, but the radio plays.
Biography
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from WIKIPEDIA:
Douglas Noël Adams (March 11, 1952 - May 11, 2001), known to some fans as Bop Ad or Bob (after his illegible signature), or by his initials "DNA", was a cult British comic radio dramatist, amateur musician and author, most notably of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (HHGG or H2G2). Hitchhiker's began on radio, and developed into a "trilogy" of five books (which sold more than fifteen million copies during his lifetime) as well as a television series, a towel, a computer game and a feature film that was completed after Adams's death.
In addition to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote or co-wrote three stories of science fiction staple Doctor Who, and served the series as Script Editor during the seventeenth season. His other written works include the Dirk Gently novels, and co-author credits on two Liff books and Last Chance to See, itself based on a radio series. Adams also originated the idea for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was realized by a company that Adams co-founded, and adapted into a novel by Terry Jones. A posthumous collection of essays and other material, including an incomplete novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002. His fans and friends also knew Adams as an environmental activist and a lover of fast cars, cameras, the Apple Macintosh, and other "techno gizmos." He was a keen technologist, using such inventions as e-mail and Usenet before they became widely popular, or even widely known.
Adams was a self-described "radical atheist". Towards the end of his life, he was a sought-after lecturer on topics including technology and the environment. Since his death at the age of 49, he is still widely revered in science fiction and fantasy fandom circles.
ginger January 31st, 2006 03:34 PM PST