If a friend of yours turns out to be an alien who whisks you away from Earth by hitchhiking aboard a Vogon ship seconds before the planet is destroyed due to some bureaucratic screw-up, the best method of intersteller travel is by Infinite Improbability Drive.

“Space,” [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says,”Is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

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And if you travel the universe, make sure you have the esteemed Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with you, one of the greatest books ever to come out of the publishing corporations of Ursa Minor.

Why is this on our bookshelf?

Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has become, along with the other books in the series, one of the favorite cult classics of the science fiction genre. It definitely deserves a place on our shelves as an incredibly geeky book.

Like many cult classics, it reaches its true potential when you have a group of people who have all read it and you can throw around references and inside jokes just to see knowing grins from all who are in the know. Forty-two guys, remember!

Rating (5 stars)

Books that are just good fun and don’t provide deep meaning or require me to spend time in deep thought, I call candy books. They’re delicious, but perhaps not complete literary nourishment.

I love my candy books, but usually they aren’t five-star books. This one is. Thank you Douglas Adams, for injecting a huge dose of wacky humor into the genre of Sci-fi. Without you, what would we do?