My Favourite Reads: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

There are so many books in the world that it's hard to pinpoint true favourites at times, but I thought it might be nice to create a little series of posts to celebrate some of my big favourite books and shine some light on why they have such a large and special place in my heart.

I'm starting with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. This book (or series of books, more correctly) alongside some quite similarly styled sci-fi comedy novels by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor (the creators of Red Dwarf) made me realise how much I love sci-fi and its ability to play with a vast range of astonishing possibilities concerning technology and human growth. The absurd comedy that leaps through bone-shakingly funny one-liners from concept to concept was the perfect avenue for me to explore speculative scientific possibilities. The way Adams weaved his constant tongue-in-cheek commentary through an endless parade of mad galactic happenings was like nothing I'd ever read before, and it was glorious. I felt like my brain was exploding as the story unfolded, with each step taking our hapless, dressing gown clad hero Arthur Dent further into an expanding universe of clever, well-woven silliness.

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

 ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Adams' writing style is also very reminiscent of Spike Milligan, and bits of Hitchhiker's Guide remind me of The Bible According to Spike Milligan - take the quote above compared with Milligan's opening, "In the beginning God created the Heaven and Earth and darkness was upon the face of the deep; this was due to a malfunction at Lots Road Power Station."

It's this irreverent humour that drives much of Hitchhiker's Guide, but there's some quite touching introspection along the way concerning what it might mean to be a human, and for me it's that combination and the sarcastic, sad, and self-important characters that make this book such a treat. Hitchhiker's Guide manages to capture a good chunk of the wonder and strangeness there is to being alive as a human person, and wraps it all up in a sort of tipsy geography teacher sarcasm. Whatever that means.