What a delightful, bittersweet book.
This is a collection of works by Adams published after his sudden death in 2001. Most of the book consists of magazine essays and other short nonfiction, and introductions he wrote for other books, and short stories he had written that hadn't been published elsewhere, and one transcript of an absolutely incredible extemporaneous speech he gave on religion. The final part of it is the first nine or so chapters of the novel he had been working on (for almost a decade) when he died.
This was the perfect book to read after finishing Ready Player One. What Douglas Adams did is everything that that depiction of geek culture doesn't understand about what can make geek culture fun and wonderful. The way Adams delighted in the world, and most importantly wanted to share what he found, and discuss it and play with it and reinvent it rather than just regurgitate it, made me want to engage with people and information and history like little else has in recent memory. He was so enthusiastic about so many things that it made me ache for how much he didn't get to see or do or experience, and it also made me feel (mostly in a good way) my own mortality in a way I don't always. I started to read this book the weekend after the 2016 General Election, but I didn't have the capacity for viewing his joy and delight in the world at that point. I do now, thankfully, and it's been a helpful if unintentional benchmark for my own outlook and emotional well-being to compare how much I struggled with this book then and how necessary it felt to read now. The world is so big and so vast and so absurd, as well as being tragic and brutal and sad, and Adams jumped into all of that, and now he is reminding me to do the same.
Grade: A
This is a collection of works by Adams published after his sudden death in 2001. Most of the book consists of magazine essays and other short nonfiction, and introductions he wrote for other books, and short stories he had written that hadn't been published elsewhere, and one transcript of an absolutely incredible extemporaneous speech he gave on religion. The final part of it is the first nine or so chapters of the novel he had been working on (for almost a decade) when he died.
This was the perfect book to read after finishing Ready Player One. What Douglas Adams did is everything that that depiction of geek culture doesn't understand about what can make geek culture fun and wonderful. The way Adams delighted in the world, and most importantly wanted to share what he found, and discuss it and play with it and reinvent it rather than just regurgitate it, made me want to engage with people and information and history like little else has in recent memory. He was so enthusiastic about so many things that it made me ache for how much he didn't get to see or do or experience, and it also made me feel (mostly in a good way) my own mortality in a way I don't always. I started to read this book the weekend after the 2016 General Election, but I didn't have the capacity for viewing his joy and delight in the world at that point. I do now, thankfully, and it's been a helpful if unintentional benchmark for my own outlook and emotional well-being to compare how much I struggled with this book then and how necessary it felt to read now. The world is so big and so vast and so absurd, as well as being tragic and brutal and sad, and Adams jumped into all of that, and now he is reminding me to do the same.
Grade: A
No comments:
Post a Comment