A TRILOGY IN FOUR PARTS
Charting the whole of Arthur Dent´s odyssey through space are:

THE HITCHHIKER´S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
One Thursday lunchtime the Earth gets unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this seems already to be more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only just begun, and the Galaxy is a very very very large and startling place.

THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
When all questions of space, time, matter and the nature of being have been resolved, only one question remains - "Where shall we have dinner?" The Restaurant at the End of the Universe provides the ultimate gastronomic experience, and for one there is no morning after to worry about.

LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING
In consequence of a number of stunning catastrophes, Arthur Dent is surprised to find himself living in a hideously miserable cave on prehistoric Earth. However, just as he thinks that things cannot possibly get any worse, they suddenly do. He discovers that the Galaxy is not only mindboggling big and bewildering but also that most of the things that happen in it are staggeringly unfair.

SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH
Just as Arthur Dent´s sense of reality is in its dickiest state he suddenly finds the girl of his dreams. He finds her in the last place in the Universe in which he would expect to find anything at all, but which 3,976,000 people will find oddly familiar. They go in search of God´s Final Message to His Creation and, in a dramatic break with tradition, actually find it.

Ein echter Klassiker und ein Muss für alle Fans von skurriler Science-Fiction jenseits von Star-Trek.

Gotcha! Wollte ich immer schon mal im Original lesen!

So long, and thanks for all the book!!

Andy

It took me a while to complete the book. I did enjoy it much in English. And now it will travel along again, bye dear book!

Wie immer in der Zone neben Kassa1 zu finden...

Ah, it's been ages since I read the Hitchhiker's Guide books... I can hardly remember when it was that I read them the first time, and how I liked them, nor do I remember so many of the story details. And that's why I actually had been planning to re-read the books sometime, and then I discovered this edition in the OBCZ-shelf, and thought that's the perfect chance for that now, lucky me. :)

This pocket book collection is not complete though, since it does only include four of the Hitchhiker's Guide novels - the fifth, "Mostly Harmless" is missing. That shouldn't be too much of a problem though, with almost 600 pages there's still enough there to keep me reading for a while.

[edit august 2006:] I just realized that this book here has been sitting in my shelf for almost exactly a year now! I finished reading it quite a while ago, but then totally forgot about it, shame on me. *embarrassed*
Anyhoo... Douglas Adams clearly had a brilliant mind, and yet I have to confess that I liked the first volumes of the HHGTTG better than the last ones, not that I thought those badly written or anything. ;) Maybe it's just that the storyline is a bit more coherent in the first volumes, later on it seems at times that it's more of a batch full of ideas than an actual story. Ingenius and witty ideas, mind you, but somewhat loosely connected, therefore my mind kept wandering from the storyline at times and I found it harder to actually concentrate on the text. Or maybe, after trying to read all 600 pages in one go, I was just suffering from "more of the same"-syndrome, who knows. ;)

But definitely worth reading, and definitely worth re-reading, too. I suppose, to be able to fully appreciate the whole hilarious absurdity of the Hitch Hiker's Guide in all its brilliantly phrased glory you'll have to read it more than just once or twice anyways.

RELEASE NOTES:

A release for the Official BookCrossing-Zone, to be released around 2pm today.