The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

No animals were harmed in the reading of this novel.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, 1979, Harmony Books.  Genre: SciFi. 215 pages.  Finished 4/25/2012.

LesOpinion: I graduated with a degree in English Literature without ever having read Moby Dick.*  This fact is perhaps less surprising than the fact that, as an avid teenage reader, I never read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Which is too bad.  Because I would have liked it then.  I would have thought it clever.  Now I read it and think that it's trying to be clever, which isn't the same thing as actually being that way.  It is also possible that this spoof on science fiction didn't appeal to me simply because I haven't read enough science fiction to make spoofing sporting. 


*I rectified my Moby Dick-lessness in 2006.

I'm No Stranger to Mediocrity: Two by Peter Abrahams

Hard Rain, Peter Abrahams, 1988, E.P. Dutton. Genre: Crime. 374 pages. Finished 4/14/2012.

A Perfect Crime, Peter Abrahams, 1998, Ballantine Books. Genre: Crime. 322 pages.  Finished 4/19/2012.

LesOpinion: Remember back when we had big hair and hated the Russians?  Peter Abrahams manages to make one of his early novels, Hard Rain, contain every 80's icon he could get his hands on:  big hair, burned out hippies, coke-snorting rockers, Russian spies, CIA agents, and snobbish college students.  The whole thing is a ridiculous, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mystery that I figured out on about page 2.  Which meant that reading all the way to page 374 for the big reveal was a bit of a slog.  I kept wanting to shout to the heroine, "No! He's the other guy!"  But that just goes to show that shouting at books is no more useful than shouting at the TV.

Fast forward ten years for A Perfect Crime, and we find that Abrahams has joined the rest of us in giving up on hating Russians.  Instead, he has settled down to pen a thriller about a cuckolded man who wants to kill his wife.

Abrahams wants to write about strong women who overcome difficulties.  Note to Mr. Abrahams: If the men your heroines marry or carry on with weren't such one-dimensional, pathetic plot-devices it wouldn't reduce the ladies to self-flagellating idiots.

I'm Back. And I'm Better than Ever.

S. White Dickinson Memorial Library, Whately, Massachusetts

I think it's time, Gentle Reader, that I resume the Library Quest.  Because I no longer frequent Conway's Field Memorial Library, we're switching the Quest's rules to apply to the shelves of the S. White Dickinson Memorial Library in downtown Whately, Massachusetts.  The same rules apply to the quest, this time around.  And, yes, I'm starting back at the beginning of the fiction shelves and reading any books that weren't on the shelves in Conway.