Maybe I need a break from trying to focus on reading while in a busy place like a restaurant or café, is what I thought to myself the day I finally finished all the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy books. Because I only did so mainly on weekends and not work lunch breaks, those books took over a year to get through. Does that pace mean anything at all, really?
So, I reluctantly dragged my challenge out more and uncovered my signed copy of Kirk Read’s How I Learned to Snap. To the watcher, it was a 1 inch-ish thick plain black hard back, which can make me giggle while fighting against the book’s automatic closure feature. To the reader (and whoever held it in the restaurant’s lost and found with the “xoxo” magnet I was using as a bookmark), it was hilariously contraband g-a-y.
When I finally finished that book, I sifted through my tubs of non-college-textbooks for my next victim, I mean challenge: a paperback of David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day. A copy of that book, I watched a shirtless swimmer guy on a gay beach deck chair a reading in Sigies/Barcelona, Spain, about a month after Sam’s funeral. That reader said I should read it, so I bought a copy upon my return to Virginia. I think I only read it all once and stored it away.
As books with green chalkboard covers go, this one was more willing to be held and read in one hand while siping plastic Coca-Cola cups of Iced Tea with the other, a balancing act in a safe yet dignified manner.
Then came Sedaris’s “… the march of the headless plushies …” and I couldn’t stop laughing about The Nutcracker now being stuck in my head.
My big, green hardback that Sam left me, “The More than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide” (1992) list’s thus:
1) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
2) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
3) Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982)
4) So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish (1985)
5) Young Zephod Plays It Safe (1986)
Then, much later in the mid-late 2000’s, I found the 6th book of the trilogy:
6) Mostly Harmless (1992)
An annoying trait of these is whenever there’s a new edition, or radio/tv/game/movie, things change, and controversies arise. Like, the big green book says, “42!” (and so did one of many 42 drawing scenes in the BBC tv series version of the 80’s.) So, it’s debatable, forever, if that was some editor’s influence, more often than a perpetual typo, or Douglas Adams actually meant forty-two factorial which is a very big integer indeed!
Okay, I see now I have read the first five in Tom’s edition. We need to get that sixth one. And if so, I might reread them and then read six. I’ve only read them once and that was sometime around 2011.
Now you’ve put that bloody song in my head!
You’ve got the right weather for it!
Maybe I need a break from trying to focus on reading while in a busy place like a restaurant or café, is what I thought to myself the day I finally finished all the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy books. Because I only did so mainly on weekends and not work lunch breaks, those books took over a year to get through. Does that pace mean anything at all, really?
So, I reluctantly dragged my challenge out more and uncovered my signed copy of Kirk Read’s How I Learned to Snap. To the watcher, it was a 1 inch-ish thick plain black hard back, which can make me giggle while fighting against the book’s automatic closure feature. To the reader (and whoever held it in the restaurant’s lost and found with the “xoxo” magnet I was using as a bookmark), it was hilariously contraband g-a-y.
When I finally finished that book, I sifted through my tubs of non-college-textbooks for my next victim, I mean challenge: a paperback of David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day. A copy of that book, I watched a shirtless swimmer guy on a gay beach deck chair a reading in Sigies/Barcelona, Spain, about a month after Sam’s funeral. That reader said I should read it, so I bought a copy upon my return to Virginia. I think I only read it all once and stored it away.
As books with green chalkboard covers go, this one was more willing to be held and read in one hand while siping plastic Coca-Cola cups of Iced Tea with the other, a balancing act in a safe yet dignified manner.
Then came Sedaris’s “… the march of the headless plushies …” and I couldn’t stop laughing about The Nutcracker now being stuck in my head.
How many Hitchhiker’s Guide books are there? I think I read only one and didn’t know there are more.
My big, green hardback that Sam left me, “The More than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide” (1992) list’s thus:
1) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
2) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
3) Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982)
4) So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish (1985)
5) Young Zephod Plays It Safe (1986)
Then, much later in the mid-late 2000’s, I found the 6th book of the trilogy:
6) Mostly Harmless (1992)
An annoying trait of these is whenever there’s a new edition, or radio/tv/game/movie, things change, and controversies arise. Like, the big green book says, “42!” (and so did one of many 42 drawing scenes in the BBC tv series version of the 80’s.) So, it’s debatable, forever, if that was some editor’s influence, more often than a perpetual typo, or Douglas Adams actually meant forty-two factorial which is a very big integer indeed!
Okay, I see now I have read the first five in Tom’s edition. We need to get that sixth one. And if so, I might reread them and then read six. I’ve only read them once and that was sometime around 2011.
