Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1st Post)

"One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite like human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about" (32).

32 pages in and this isn't even the best quote. It took me all of 2 paragraphs to realize that this author was going to have a very dry sense of humor that was going to permeate the entire novel. Excellent! The first thing you'll notice about the author's use of satire is that it's everywhere, whether the author is narrating, a character is thinking, or in just some of the names and descriptions of items and characters in the book. What I've really enjoyed is how the satire really drives the story. As the characters run to and from each preposterous scenario I have found myself reading with increased anticipation of the next off the wall comment that the narrator or character will utter next; comments which usually draw a laugh-out-loud moment, invariably making my coworkers wonder if maybe I shouldn't actually be working instead of reading.

The satirically clever writing of the author is found throughout every facet of this novel, including the imagery. This imagery in this book is vastly different from more serious novels like No Country for Old Men. The picture Adams paints is frequently an upside down way of looking at something. Instead of saying "The ship hovered in the air." Adams once again turns to humor to accomplish his goals, "The ship hung in the air much the way a brick doesn't." In doing so he is able to take a vague image of a space ship that the reader has and give it bulky, ungainly properties making the ready wonder, "Why exactly hasn't that over-sized ship fallen from the sky like a ton of bricks?"

I already know I like this book. I knew it the 2nd paragraph of the book when the author was making fun of people for thinking money was the root of their problems. I like it more and more with each irreverently sarcastic point of view the author shares. The toughest thing about this book is not laughing out loud at the humorous writing.