The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

About fifty pages into The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adam's sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I began to have the feeling that I'd read it before. The scene of Zaphod climbing down the building which stuck in the ground at a 45 degree angle was eerily familiar. I already knew that the end of the universe was a temporal reference, not a spatial one, but I chalked that up to probably being a Futurama episode I'd half-forgotten. By the time Arthur and Ford arrived on Earth 20,000 years before it will have been blown up, I knew I'd already read this book. But it had taken me the entire book to reach that conclusion.

Even though I just finished this book, those are still the only three details that are sticking in my mind. It's not that this book is bad. It was entertaining. But it was like a mediocre episode of Futurama. Something I'm bound to forget the details of because I'm simply not paying close enough attention. There just wasn't anything that really grabbed me.

It's a bit sad, because I loved the first book so much. But this one left me wanting something more substantial. Which is funny, because it probably has *more* plot than HHG.

At this point, unless someone offers a really compelling reason, I probably won't be continuing this series. At least not any time soon. There are so many other books I want to read, and the blahness of this one sent the rest of the series plummeting to the bottom of my to-read list.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more