The first couple of books in the series are great but the last few i had no enjoyment in reading. All the characters become bitter and unlikeable, finishing the series was such an effort. I might get around to re-reading them some day and hopefully i’ll enjoy it more, maybe.
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My Meaning of Liff book came with a sticker on it that reads “This book will change your life!” and if I remember correctly, the definition of Liff is a book with a sticker promising to change your life, on it.
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whereas the movie is quite new
The movie came out 14 years ago. Damn I’m old. And it’s true, the years really do go by faster the older you get.
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What?!?!?!!?!?
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You are entirely correct:
LIFF (n.)
A book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover.
For instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words. ‘This book will change your life’.
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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. That should be the mantra for entertainment these days.
Gaiman wrote an interesting forward to So Long And Thanks For All The Fish wherein he points out that Adams was not actually a novelist – until then he had never written a novel from scratch before and the publisher pretty much locked him in a hotel room to get him to finish it.
It is fortunately available via the book’s Amazon page:
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Yup. The original TV series is definitely worth a watch, but it was made on a budget where shoestrings were luxury extras. The Guide entries in the series, on the other hand, those are perfection. And made entirely via traditional animation.
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This. I realy like it, but stuff like Zaphod’s extra head…
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But that head was some of the best paper māché work of the 1980’s!
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Yeah i did find out later on that Adams was basically contractually obligated from the start to do a series of books. He begrudgingly did the series and it tells, particularly when you realize how unhappy the characters become with each subsequent book (and how the series ends)
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And I recall that Mark Wing-Davey quipped that the head cost twice as much to make as he was being paid, but that it was fair since its acting was twice as good as his.
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It also put in a better performance than Mark Wing-Davey did … he said so himself.
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Joke was on them! The hotel room had a bath where he could ignore the writing part and procrastinate.
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On par with the best effects in Tom Baker era Dr. Who, even!
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They were both BBC productions in the 80s, so that makes sense. 
Edited to fix: 80s, not 70s.
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It was clear that he was not happy with the way society was going. In one of the later books he throws in a diatribe about how bad the American President (at the time, Reagan) was. He didn’t live to see the the worst of Dubya and I shudder to think how he would react to the Trump/Johnson era.
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Likewise, my 15 yo was assigned it in advanced English and loved it. Then again, he may be genetically predisposed to this disorder: for my 42nd birthday, I made everyone bring a towel…
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Thinking of it in translation is weird. When I lived for a few years in Montreal, I read a lot in French to help polish my vocabulary. While I didn’t read any Douglas Adams in French, I did read one of Prachett’s Discworld books and it was clear that the translator didn’t get that it wasn’t a serious fantasy novel – most of the jokes were gone.
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I definitely enjoyed the last couple more after a couple decades to let them soak in.
Also - there is a vinyl play version that is NOT the radio version. Not that I’m recommending them, but if you are a completest…
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