Book Review - Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, 3.5 stars out of 5

I am always on the fence if I can really say I "read" a book if I listened to the audiobook of it instead of actually reading it, but more and more I'm leaning on the side of yes. Probably because I have been listening to audiobooks more and more frequently. They really do make cleaning so much more bearable. 

And this was a very fun audiobook. It was narrated by someone with a British accent, which made all of the ironic humor even more enjoyable. This is a book that I decided to read mostly for cultural literacy reasons, and there were several things in it that made other things make sense, like the website Babelfish. 

I decided in my book reviews to write one thing I like and one thing I don't like about each book, to help me structure my thoughts a bit more. 

I liked: It really was fun to listen to. The book is so full of improbability and impossibility all told in such a hopeless ironic way, is that a horrible explanation? Yes. Yes it is. But regardless I thought it was really just fun. The bizarre friendships and the robots with personality problems, the 30 second life of a sperm whale, it was so weird but somehow it all worked for me and was funny instead of just being annoying, which I kind of went into the book expecting. I guess that's one thing about starting a book with rather low expectations, I should always do that, because when I have high expectations I tend to not like the book as well as I wanted to. 

I didn't like: Some of the more random parts were amazingly... random. But I wasn't looking for life lessons, so I can forgive it for that. 

All in all, if you haven't read this book, I would say go for it. If your library has Overdrive or a similar app for borrowing audiobooks, that is where I listened to it, and I liked the narrator quite well.