Staff Picks - LibGuides at Boulder Public Library

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is a weird, funny book that begins with an Englishman’s attempts to prevent the city council from demolishing his house to make room for a bypass. But the Englishman, Arthur Dent, has a friend Ford Prefect who tries to tell him that there are bigger problems to worry about. A group of aliens called Vogons are going to demolish the Earth to make room for a hyperspatial express route through the Milky Way. Seconds before this happens Ford and Arthur hitch a ride on the Vogon ship (without the Vogons’ knowledge) and thus get away safely. Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect then band together with an assortment of oddballs, vagabonds, and even a former president of the galaxy. Ford Prefect turns out to be an alien who had come to Earth to research an encyclopedia about everything in the galaxy. Despite its outlandish premise, the novel offers zany humor with laugh out loud moments as well as insights into the quest for the meaning of life and the deepest secrets of a certain planet are revealed. The author has a way of describing common things in a way that turns one’s head upside down, such as his description of the sun in the opening line: “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”

Henry, eighth-grade teen volunteer

Publisher's description:

This is the story of Arthur Dent, who, seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, is plucked off the planet by his friend, Ford Prefect, who has been posing as an out-of-work actor for the last fifteen years but is really a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Together they begin a journey through the galaxy aided by quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Find The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in our online catalog.

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Henry recommends The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams