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Almost everyone knows that line from that book,

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

It has been mentioned in Tumblr posts, Instagram posts, twitter jokes, what most people might not know is that this line comes from the Douglas Adams book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide book series.

This series is composed of five books and a short story written by Douglas Adams, and another book written by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer. The book I’ve read consists of the five mains books of the Hitchhiker’s series, plus a short story. In the end, the contents of this book are these:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read) Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised Guide. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe The moment before annihilation at the hands of warmongers is a curious time to crave tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his comrades as they hurtle across the galaxy in a desperate search for a place to eat.

Life, the Universe and Everything The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky- so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals can avert Armageddon: mild-mannered Arthur Dent and his stalwart crew.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish Back on Earth, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription thrusts him back to reality. So to speak. Mostly Harmless Just when Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life, all hell breaks loose. Can he save the Earth from total obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter from herself?

Includes the bonus story "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe"

Having read all of them I have my opinions.

SPOILER ALERT

The books are funny, just reading the first chapters can tell you that the books are very very funny. Some passages of it are enough to make you laugh out loud because they are that funny. It focuses on the story of Arthur Dent, his friends, and the shenanigans he ends up getting involved in. These friends include Ford Perfect, an alien who has lived on Earth for year and writes for said Guide, Zaphod Beeblebrox, an alien with two heads who is also the President of the Galaxy at the beginning of the book series. Tricia “Trillian” McMillian, a human astrophysicist, who meets Zaphod at a party and ends up traveling the universe with him, and Marvin, a depressed robot. These are the main characters of the series, alongside Arthur, who is the main character, and they show up on almost all the books. One of the most important things in the books is also the guide itself, that instead of a book is more of a portable computer with a Wikipedia that spans the knowledge of almost everything in the universe. Another important character is Fenchurch, but she will show up later.

The first two books are funny, lighthearted and make a good show of world building (or destroying). The story begins with the Earth being destroyed to build a special highway, and Ford Perfect escaping just before the Earth explodes with Arthur Dent. With them they take a towel, the most important item anyone can take with them when they travel the universe, and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, a guide, much like our earthly travel guides, that tells you the best activities and places to visit whenever your travelling, Ford happens to work for the Guide.

In the end they end up watching the end of the Universe, seeing the last message form God, discovering that the Earth was nothing but an experiment to find out the ultimate question to all things in the universe (experiment funded by rats, the smartest lifeform on earth) they also time travel, travel through different parallel universes et cetera et cetera.

In the end the books are a very fun read, with one exception, which is the chaos. The books are very chaotic, and while that is part of the attraction of the books, the chaos is funny, makes you confused, in a good way, and works to explain what is happening to the characters and how Arthur Dent feels most of the time- However, there comes a point where it’s too much, and what happens its that you end up so confused you’re not really sure what you’re reading. There is no character index, a small summary of each other books in the end, nothing of the sort. So, if you’re confused, you either google the events of the books, or you read back a few chapters to see if you can make sense of it. And sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t.

By the second to last book, it seems like the author is pulling at straws, Arthur is, for some reason stranded on prehistoric earth, travels to space again, and manages to time travel back to his own time, where the earth isn’t destroyed, sponsored by the dolphins (the second smartest species on Earth) who then vanished from Earth. Arthur meets a woman, Fenchurch who can float, falls in love, (they also have sex flying through the skies of London?) travel to visit a man who knows what happened to the Dolphins and then travel to see God’s last message to the Universe (Which funnily enough ends up being “We apologise for the inconvenience”). And then ends up travelling the universe with Fenchurch, although throughout his travels all he wanted was to go back to his own time on Earth.

And then, by the last book, Fenchurch is gone, the company that edits and publishes the Hitchhikers has been taken over, the universe is in shambles because of time-travel. Arthur and Trillian have a daughter, a new guide shows up that can turn into a bird and time/dimension travel, takes Arthur’s child into a version of Earth where Trillian never left, still goes by Tricia, and is a journalist, and then the Earth is destroyed again however this time, Arthur, Ford, Trillian, and the daughter all die. (However, Elvis is alive and either playing shows in diners throughout the universe or runs a diner somewhere in the Universe, I am not sure)

And if you were confused by that last chapter, you can see how I felt throughout the book, because it somehow manages to be more confusing than all the others combined. In a sense, the last book seemed, to me at least, to be a last-ditch effort to just finish the story and be done with it.

The ending came out of nowhere, Fenchurch came and disappeared out of nowhere, so did the daughter, no actual explanation is given to what happened to the Guide, and why is the Guide now a bird thing?

None of these questions are answered, however, this still doesn0t detract from the book, and even as confused as I felt, as well as the anger on how it ended, doesn’t detract, in my opinion, from its five-star rating, because it’s still an amazing book.

Its funny, engaging, entertaining, easy to read and worth to read. Even with all its faults this is a book I will recommend to everyone I can and will read again, even if it’s just to read the passages I found to the funniest once more.

I recommend this book, give it five stars, but I must warn that this book is very chaotic, and has little to no set structure, and if that isn’t for you, well, you have been warned.

[kulinersemarang-blog]

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