Book 4/15, "Off the Shelf" Challenge

For the fourth book of the "Off the Shelf" Challenge, I chose to continue to read the books in the Hitchhiker's Guide series, by Douglas Adams.


Life, the Universe and Everything is the third book in the series, and unfortunately it didn't, to me, live up to the first two installments.  There were parts that made me laugh, parts that made me nod at Mr. Adams's genius, but there were way too many parts that made me look up from the book and shake my head and say, "What did I just read?  Why is this not making any sense?"  Of course, that might be what a lot of people think while reading any of the Hitchhiker's Guide books.  The fact is that Mr. Adams continually goes off on tangents that you presume are random, but in fact, they come back later on in the book, and if you simply glossed over those tangents earlier, you won't get the humor in their later appearances.  But for some reason this book seemed to drag on a bit more than the first two and didn't seem to have quite as interesting of a plot.


All that being said, I must also mention that the reason that I might not have enjoyed this book as much as the first two could perhaps be because of the oodles of books on my shelf that I am dying to read right now.  Those books will have to wait a bit longer, though, because I just got a copy of my friend's book and I'm itching to read it and become a real-life Beta Reader.  ;)


But overall, I love Douglas Adams and his humor, and I envy his creativity.  This book, while good, just wasn't as good as the first two.