Top Ten Favorite Books I Read Before I Was A Blogger

This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for my Top Ten Favorite Books I Read Before I Was A Blogger. I started blogging in January of 2010, so I had a lot of favorite books under my belt before then. Actually, most of them are still favorite books!

  

1) The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

2) Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

3) The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

4) The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

5) To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

6) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

7) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

8) Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

9) A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

10) Persuasion by Jane Austen

A few bonus ones that could have made the list: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The History of Love, The Time Traveler's Wife, Anne of Green Gables, Nine Stories, Empire Falls, Watchmen, Gone with the Wind, Travels With Charley and 84, Charing Cross Road

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
 

by Douglas Adams


★★★☆

Time travel, a detective agency, Dodo birds, ghosts, Electric monks; this book is a hodgepodge of sci-fi elements and the bizarre, which is to say it’s a novel by Douglas Adams.

I’m a huge fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and so I’ve been looking forward to this one for years. To tell the truth I was a bit disappointed, although the book is hilarious it’s also a bit convoluted and hard to follow. It still has Adam’s trademark humor and pokes fun at the absurd, but it lacks the heart that you’ll find in Hitchhiker. I think that a big part of the reason why can be attributed to Arthur Dent’s absence. His bumbling humanness is what grounds the craziness of Hitchhiker. The main character in Dirk, Richard MacDuff, is similar to Arthur but he’s never quite as endearing.

It’s almost impossible to explain the premise of the book, but this line from it is as close as I can get …

“Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.” - Dirk Gently (also known as Svlad Cjelli).

One element that I loved was the idea of the Electric monks. People have created machines to do almost all of their menial tasks. We have dishwashers, microwaves, washing machines, etc. This novel takes it once step further, they’ve created robots called Electric monks to do their believing for them. It’s just one example of Adam’s brilliance.

“Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see?”

“If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.”

“The phone rang and Janice answered it. ‘Good afternoon,’ she said, ‘Wainwright’s Fruit Emporium. Mr. Wainwright is not able to take calls at this time since he is not right in the head and thinks he is a cucumber.’”

BOTTOM LINE: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the best place to start with Adam’s work. If you already love that series then definitely check this one out! It’s not quite up to the same standard, but nothing of Adam’s should be missed.

p.s. I have to mention one fantastic line that nods to Hitchhiker, “Do you always carry a towel around in your briefcase?”