book data
7641 ratings, 3.94 average rating, 155 reviews
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published
1991
(first published 1984)
by Pocket
binding
Mass Market Paperback, 204 pages
isbn
0671745530
(isbn13: 9780671745530)
description
Arthur Dent is out of his bathrobe, in love, and wondering why the dolphins said...So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. Was the earth really demolishe...more
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avg 3.94
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Read in March, 2006
I love Douglas Adams' books.. They are SO RANDOM, which is my kind of funny, so I found them hilarious! They contain a lot of spaceship/science talk which for the most part doesn't make sense, but if you have any background in physics and can understand what he's implying, it makes it all the funnier. But no matter your background, you will finish with a big fat "WHAT THE...??"
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Read in January, 1994
recommends it for:
Everyone with a working heart
Simply one of the best love stories ever written.
I'm a decided fan of Adams' Hitchhiker *cough* trilogy *end cough*, mostly for his wry asides and absurd view of humanity. He is genuinely hilarious.
That being said, his first three books felt to me something like a series of insanely inventive comedy sketches in search of a plot. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is still wonderfully loopy and littered with idiosyncratic characters and occurances, but it feels less like...more
I'm a decided fan of Adams' Hitchhiker *cough* trilogy *end cough*, mostly for his wry asides and absurd view of humanity. He is genuinely hilarious.
That being said, his first three books felt to me something like a series of insanely inventive comedy sketches in search of a plot. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is still wonderfully loopy and littered with idiosyncratic characters and occurances, but it feels less like...more
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recommends it for:
fans of sci-fi, comedy, romance or magical realism
If any of the inappropriately named Hitchhiker's Guide Trilogy could be called "best", I think this is it. I see two elements setting it apart from the other books in the HHGG series: its tight plot, and the fact that it is at heart a romantic comedy more than a farcical satire of the Science Fiction genre.
As one would expect, the focus of the storyline is the continued pursuit of the Ultimate Question, to which we already know that the Ultimate Answer is "Forty-two".
...more
As one would expect, the focus of the storyline is the continued pursuit of the Ultimate Question, to which we already know that the Ultimate Answer is "Forty-two".
...more
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Read in March, 1985
recommends it for:
everyone who loves science fiction and has a sense of humour
Unlike many people, I didn't come to the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy via the radio series, I was a book fan right from the start.
So, back in 1985 when Douglas Adams wrote another entry in the canon I was unfeasibly excited...
And with So Long there wasn't any disappointment, its one of my favourite books, one I can go back to time and time again.
It seems to me that Adams took the opportunity to experiment with some of his wilder ideas of what he could do in a book. One chapter ...more
So, back in 1985 when Douglas Adams wrote another entry in the canon I was unfeasibly excited...
And with So Long there wasn't any disappointment, its one of my favourite books, one I can go back to time and time again.
It seems to me that Adams took the opportunity to experiment with some of his wilder ideas of what he could do in a book. One chapter ...more
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Arthur and Fenchurch arrive at the home of Wonko The Sane:
"What it was like was this:
It was inside out.
Actually inside out, to the extent that they had to park on the carpet.
All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which was decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves, also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semi-circular tops which stand in such a way as to suggest that someone just dropped the wall straight through them, and p...more
"What it was like was this:
It was inside out.
Actually inside out, to the extent that they had to park on the carpet.
All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which was decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves, also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semi-circular tops which stand in such a way as to suggest that someone just dropped the wall straight through them, and p...more
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Read in November, 2008
recommends it for:
Humor/ Sci-Fi Readers
In this Fourth installment of the Hitchhiker's series Arthur Dent somehow, after a long needed vacation, returns to Earth even though he distinctly remembers it getting demolished to build a intergalactic highway 8 years ago. Even more wierd is that no one seems to remember this event and everyone just remembers a hallucination. As he returns home even more questions start to appear: Who left the fish bowl for him? Where did all the dolphins go, and what was God's last message to creation? t...more
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The fourth book in the increasingly misnamed Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy is really a romantic comedy in which the male lead just happens to have returned from an eight year trip around the Horsehead Nebula. And so we enjoy the love story of Arthur Dent and Fenny playing out above the streets of Islington.
A parallel universe has furnished us with a new Earth and the Vogons destroying the original has been explained away as just another conspiracy theory. Arthur was hoping to ret...more
A parallel universe has furnished us with a new Earth and the Vogons destroying the original has been explained away as just another conspiracy theory. Arthur was hoping to ret...more
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Read in January, 1991
recommends it for:
Douglas Adams fans
The fourth book in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy (yes, you read that correctly) is, in my opinion, perhaps the best. It's 204 pages are crammed full of more wit, humor, and irrationality than could easily fit inside an Arcturan Megafreighter. Plus, you finally get to see Arthur Dent get some--though it's not with Trillian, as you might have expected from the first three books. And for those of you who got bogged down with all the space travel and alien references in books one through three, rest assu...more
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As good as the rest: Really, I do believe that this one should have finished the series. It has a good, fulfilling ending(I don't mind unhappy endings at all, but they should have a point, if nothing else to be tragic. Mostly Harmless most definitely did NOT have a point.), and despite the lack of Zaphod, which I didn't really notice, it's a fun read. Was the Guide ever intended to be more? No! It's got just as much absurdity as the rest, if a bit more sedate and sense-of-wonder-oriented, but th...more
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Read in August, 2007
recommends it for:
Hitchhiker fans
Fourth book in the Hitchhiker "trilogy."
Arthur Dent returns to Earth. The fact that Earth has already been destroyed by Vogons is not particularly important. Why and how Arthur returns remains a mystery, but he is relieved to find that Earth still exists and that only a few months have passed since he first caught a ride with a passing spaceship.
The novel's main focus is Arthur's relationship with Fenchurch, a woman who he falls for at first sight. Their journey of eventual...more
Arthur Dent returns to Earth. The fact that Earth has already been destroyed by Vogons is not particularly important. Why and how Arthur returns remains a mystery, but he is relieved to find that Earth still exists and that only a few months have passed since he first caught a ride with a passing spaceship.
The novel's main focus is Arthur's relationship with Fenchurch, a woman who he falls for at first sight. Their journey of eventual...more
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Read in April, 2008
The best since the original is the most inventive since the original.
Adams veers away from his standard plot twists to give us something more. Arthur Dent leaves behind his constant idiocy that makes him less a hero than the protaganist by default, and becomes what he has always threatened to be, a complete, engaging, well rounded "everyman" character.
His adventures here are remarkable, witty and fun, without the tediousness of being tied to to advanced lectures in quantum mech...more
Adams veers away from his standard plot twists to give us something more. Arthur Dent leaves behind his constant idiocy that makes him less a hero than the protaganist by default, and becomes what he has always threatened to be, a complete, engaging, well rounded "everyman" character.
His adventures here are remarkable, witty and fun, without the tediousness of being tied to to advanced lectures in quantum mech...more
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Read in March, 2008
Synopsis
Just as Arthur Dent's sense of reality is in its dickiest state he suddenly finds the girl of his dreams. He finds her in the last place in which he would expect to find anything at all, but which 3,976,000,000 people will find oddly familiar. They go in search of God's Final Message to His Creation and, in a dramatic break from tradition, actually find it. This is the audio edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". 'By turns authoritative as the narrator, bemused as...more
Just as Arthur Dent's sense of reality is in its dickiest state he suddenly finds the girl of his dreams. He finds her in the last place in which he would expect to find anything at all, but which 3,976,000,000 people will find oddly familiar. They go in search of God's Final Message to His Creation and, in a dramatic break from tradition, actually find it. This is the audio edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". 'By turns authoritative as the narrator, bemused as...more
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This was the fourth book in the series. A long one, i know, but i was very content on sticking it out. About halfway through the book, i stopped. I just put it down. A week later i picked it up again, and started over. it didn't help. About half the book was practically non-sensical. i'd say i read about three times the amount of pages i had originally thought i would. eventually, i got through it. there were still a few terms i didn't get, some planets, and some races. you know, the m...more
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Read in July, 2008
I appreciate the author not wanting to keep rehashing the same formula for this book, but the end result wasn't good. I didn't feel like the characters developed or grew much, and the romance felt out place. Plus there are several scenes where the lovers fly around in the sky and have sex, which made it read like bad Dragonall Z fanfic at times.
The only things that saved this book were a) breaking from the zany-roadtrip-around-the-galaxy mold of the previous three books b) the author's c...more
The only things that saved this book were a) breaking from the zany-roadtrip-around-the-galaxy mold of the previous three books b) the author's c...more
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Read in March, 2008
This was probably my favorite of the 4 books (I'm not counting "Young Zaphod Plays it Safe as it seems more like an excerpt... not sure if it was something that he just didn't finish or what). I really enjoyed how Arthur and Fenchurch kept crossing paths as if they were meant to be together (which, of course, they were).
It does get a little weird in the end, but I liked God's final message to his creation and really liked how it was revealed to us. Much better than just writing a line o...more
It does get a little weird in the end, but I liked God's final message to his creation and really liked how it was revealed to us. Much better than just writing a line o...more
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Read in July, 2007
This book started out extremely promising. There was a great sequence all about the nightmare situation for a polite person dealing with someone that does something that seems completely out of the bounds of normal societal etiquette. Then Arthur and his new girlfriend start flying through the sky (and having sex on airplanes) and it turned into a WTF kind of book. Just read till he finds out what's wrong with her and stop. You'll thank me for the advice, I promise you.
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Read in March, 2008
recommends it for:
everyone
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Read in July, 2008
So I cheated: my library didn't have this book on CD, and I didn't want to read it, but they did have a set of four "episodes" from BBC Radio on CD, so I got those. There's a whole cast of characters doing the voices and a slew of sound effects, so on the whole it was much more entertaining. And it saved me a week's worth of reading, so I can skip to the fifth and last book in this trilogy.
Oh, the plot was good, too.
Oh, the plot was good, too.
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