After my recent struggles with Belgacom I was rather comforted to remind myself of Arthur Dent's problems with bureaucracy, many years ago. I more or less knew this book by heart when I was twelve, and the Adams genius still works for me; most of the good lines are in the various other incarnations of the story, but one or two are only found here - for instance, the information that Arthur "wasn't aware of ever having felt an organic part of anything. He had always seen this as one of his problems." Sometimes the magic survives, three decades on.

The edition I read is the movie tie-in which comes with 100 pages of back matter about the making of the film (which. I watched a year or so back - my verdict is that the Zooey Deschanel / Martin Freeman chemistry is the best thing about it). Interesting to find that most of the (pretty radical and thorough) plot changes in the film dated back to Douglas Adams' own adaptation efforts; there is a rather self-deprecating piece by scriptwriter Karey Carmichael explaining that he didn't do much and was sort of filling in time between The Chicken Run and Charlotte's Web. The main cast are also interviewed, and I have to say that Mos Def comes across much better on the page than he did as Ford Prefect on screen.

Top LibraryThing Unsuggestion: Humility: True Greatness by C.J. Mahaney