The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

19:56Jeff:Oh, no, it's whore. It's not even. It's not even a George Carlin one. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, and it's a reference to like some title. It's like the horror of Eroticon something. Oh, yeah. Like this being of a pleasure planet. Yeah. Okay. Whatever. I guess that's it. It was the 80s. What do you want? Yeah. And then mine is kind of anecdotal here is that mainstream sci-fi, was that even a thing in books before Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? I'd like to know what the best-selling book in sci-fi was. Was it Dune? Was it Stranger in the Strange Land by Robert Heinlein? I mean, I don't know. Lord of the Rings?

20:33Well, that's fantasy.

20:34Jeff:Oh, that's right. Yeah. Right. And even Dune, Dune is space opera. Kind of a blend, yeah. It's very, very unusual. It's part of a lot of copycats. And one anecdote within the anecdote is Eric Smith, a former book writer who has turned literary agent. I remember this stuck with me. He had on his submissions page where he sort of talks about the kinds of manuscripts he's looking for, explicitly not looking for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-like submissions. Yeah. So it's stuck with writers, even if it hasn't been in the general cultural water for a while. That is interesting. And Adams himself, because of this, I think people recognize, unlike, say, some other books, you really feel the writer's voice in this, even more than Tolkien or more than Frank Herbert or more than Octavia Butler, some of the great genre fantasy world building writers.

21:23it's so voicey that he himself became and has become a sage a figure kind of like and he died young which gives him sort of the kurt cobain janice joplin jimmy hendrix kind of mythos but it's kind of a not an uninteresting but he's like he wanted to be a comedy writer like that's what

21:42Jeff:he wanted to be yeah like he he described himself as a twitchy and somewhat strange child and like you definitely get that in the writing yeah it's a little neurotic yeah born in cambridge in 1952 He grew up in London, went to prep school, and he had a Mr. Keating moment. He had a teacher named Frank Halford who had a really profound impact on him. He gave Adams the only 10 out of 10 in the class that he taught for creative writing. And Adams talked later in his life about how that was something he would draw on to help him bust his writer's block throughout his career, just remembering back to this high school teacher.

22:17Jeff:Then he went to St. John's College. As you were saying earlier, he hoped to be a writer and comedy performer in the vein of Monty Python. He did do two brief appearances in Monty Python's fourth series, which is what we would call a season here in the U.S., graduated with a degree in English Lit, and then he went out to become a TV and radio writer and just got obsessed with trying to marry sci-fi and comedy in a single project. And then in 1977, a BBC producer encouraged him to pitch a show. But he'd been actually holding on to the idea for Hitchhiker's Guide for a little while in the early 70s.

22:51Jeff:He himself was hitchhiking around Europe and he was drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria. And he's holding on to his copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe that he admits he had stolen from someone else. And he's looking at the stars in his drunken stupor and he thinks somebody should write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And that just goes into the back of his brain for five or six years until he gets this opportunity at BBC. And it sort of reemerges like, oh, that's the thing that I could call it. Let's do the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yeah. I think it's also, if you've read this or you're going to read this or you just want to understand it, I think his background, training, aspirations in sketch comedy really informs the structure and attitude of this because there isn't really a plot.

23:36There's a series of things happen. He loves a set piece. I think he's no happier than describing some planet with a weird backstory or conditions or there's some object like the history of the Babelfish or something like that. Like that's when he's really having, seems like he's really in his bag at those moment. I think that is taking an idea, taking to it logical and absurd conclusion is making it as fun as he can. And then you just move on to something else.

23:57Jeff:Yeah. That's one of the most interesting things is that there are those really detailed descriptions of particular things, but there's not really world building. We're just in this galaxy bopping around from one planet to another, having these adventures, and you find out a little bit about this planet and a little about this other one, and here's this piece of technology. But those could all be swapped out for completely different things or just called planet A, planet B, planet C, and he would still be having fun, giving you descriptions of them. The details of this book really don't matter at all.

24:28And it feels like the original idea he pitched was for the radio show was for an anthology series where in each episode, the earth was destroyed in a different way. Right. So like it was just going to reset every single time and then you have to invent everything else like this. I find myself like wondering, what if he actually wrote an abridged Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and each one just like was an entry? Because I feel like that's what he was like maybe having the most fun doing. Like, I don't think in this book, I'm now blending the other books, which I didn't reread for this, but I remember pieces of them.

24:59So it's kind of mushing in my mind. I don't ever think we get the backstory of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, but I found myself really wanting to read the Hitchhiker's Guide entry for the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

25:08Jeff:The most potent cocktail. I did find recipes for it. I'm sure. Also, I guess, plus one for drunken stupors and the inspiration for this. Pretty good show for the old right drunk at its sober moment, perhaps. Adams, like this becomes successful, as we've talked about, almost immediately. They're just off to the races as soon as the first book comes out. And then Adams is kind of trying to figure out what to do with his career because he's not Douglas Adams, million copy selling author for another couple of years. He was about to hang it up and he got a gig as a BBC radio producer that he took for the money.

25:42Jeff:He produced one job and then he went on to work on Doctor Who. So he's writing Doctor Who while he's also writing the subsequent Hitchhiker's Guide books and radio series. And even Adams himself talks about how like no one knows what the canonical Hitchhiker's Guide story is. There isn't one. If you thought that things got messy with Game of Thrones because the TV series ended before George R. R. Martin has finished the book, this was like radio series, book, book, radio series, book, radio series, book, play, game, puzzle, other radio series, other adaptation. And they all have most of the main pieces in common, but they are not beat for beat the same stories.

26:23Jeff:And I have no idea how Adam's carried all of this around in his head. There are there's probably like really deep, wonderful, nerdy Internet stuff trying to untangle all of these. But it's it's just a wild universe. Yeah, it's unruly. I mean, when you're trying to write The Guide to the Galaxy, I guess it inherently is going to be unruly. And even the title is telling you something about what this is a compendium. This is an exploration. This is not a hero's journey. Joseph Campbell. I think even there is no call to adventure or if there is, it's you just need to get off this rock and you don't know what's going to happen.

26:55Because Arthur Dent, who is putatively sort of our Bilbo Baggins or whatever, is always just confused. He has no agency. He can't do anything. He doesn't know enough to even like volunteer to take the ring. Ford Prefect just says, we're going. They're friends. And Ford Prefect, you know, that gesture of friendship is the thing that gets him off the planet. But he is subject and subject and subject. And that's kind of the story here. So really, it's Adams is the main character, I think. His own sensibility, his own creative imagination is the star of the show. And I think that's fine. I think that's just something you're going to get on with.

27:25Jeff:He does become a character in his own right in the world of writing and sci-fi fantasy, especially. We've mentioned a few times that he suffered terrible writer's block. But there is a famous Adams quote where he says, I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by. Like if you've taken a creative writing workshop or even Googled your way to like how to write a book, I'm sure you have run into that. But like really bad writer's block. when he was working on the fourth book in the series. He was locked in a hotel room for three weeks with Sonny Mehta, who is one of the most legendary editors in literary history.

28:01Jeff:And Mehta was just babysitting him to get him to finish the book. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. Legally, we can't say drinking Storm makes you smarter and more focused.

28:38But with zero sugar, 200 milligrams of caffeine, and immunity support, you're smarter and more focused for drinking Storm. Storm. Good energy in, good energy out. Energy for life. All new drinks are now at McDonald's. With refreshers like the strawberry watermelon refresher. And the mango pineapple refresher with popping boba. To crafted sodas like the Sprite Berry Blast with berry flavors and cold foam. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all now at McDonald's. Refreshers contain caffeine. Copyright 2026, The Coca-Cola Company. Sprite is a registered trademark of the Coca-Cola Company.

29:19I'm trying to think of, it'd be like if Rick Rubin had to get like Eminem and is like, we've got to finish this and we're going to sit. I know that happens, but we don't hear the story in books very often.

29:28Jeff:I would watch a stage play just about those three weeks. Just Douglas Adams and Sonny Meta in a hotel room. Kind of a grumpy sunshine dynamic between them where, you know, something is going on. And there's only one bed. There's our fanfic. And this is the fourth book. This is not like the first book. This is where he's been doing this for a little while. He just couldn't. He gets all mobbed up with the Apple crew. He loves an Apple Macintosh. He's looking at early word processors. He's someone interested in technology, as you can tell by the books themselves. Skeptical of it, but also fascinated by improbability drives and hitchhiker's guides.

30:04He can see both sides. He and Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry who narrated the unabridged audiobook that was released with the 2005 movie. he and Douglas Adams were the first two people to get the opportunity to buy a Mac in Europe, which is kind of an interesting side note at the same time. And that's like kind of entree into him being a, I don't even know if you called spiritual, but like a much loved figure in Silicon Valley in the world of technology, even until today. I think Adams would find that pretty funny and disturbing because so much of what he is like is like people get over their skis about technology.

30:43It's just us humans here and we're going to screw it up.

30:45Jeff:He's satirizing some of the big personalities in the world of politics in the book. But you can imagine that if he were alive today and writing an updated version of this, he would be satirizing Elon Musk and Sam Altman and those guys. Many of whom, especially Musk, are out talking about how much they love Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and how much Douglas Adams influenced them. And talk about misunderstanding a text. Yeah, just misreading the room. when Tesla shot that, I don't remember which of the Teslas, they shot into space. There was a copy of Hitchhiker's Guide in it, which is just so ham-handedly dumb that I can't even describe it.

31:24You don't get the subtlety. You don't get the joke at all, which I think is one of the dangers of reading a book like this is it is so funny on a surface level that I think it can be deceiving. There is a bit of sleight of hand because I think this is actually about things. It may not have a coherent argument, but it certainly has coherent critical. Yeah, there's a real perspective.

31:47Jeff:I think that's very well put. You've alluded to it a couple of times. So let's just like get into it. Tell me about your first reading of this book and what it meant and how that happened. So my uncle, who is a very interesting person, interested in the arts and a doctor, he left me. He was moving between homes, a box of his books from college when he was moving. I was 13. and it was a real grab bag. It was the first four hitchhikers. I don't think not all of them were out at this time. This would have been 91, 92. It had Portnoy's Complaint. It had Donna hit. It had Catcher in the Rye. It had Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown, which no one really talks more.

32:26I was talking about that in an earlier episode. Just all kinds of stuff. And I was a bookish kid. I don't know if I've told this story before, but in sixth grade, I tried to read the 10 longest books in the school library. And like the last one was Last of the Mohegans by James Van Rooke Cooper. And I was just that kind of kid.

32:47Jeff:You have always loved a project. I do like a project. And this book, I was a huge Star Wars fan, right? So a huge Star Trek fan with my family. We watched Star Trek Next Generation. But I also thought of myself as a fun, I like making jokes. Like I liked humor. And you like wordplay a lot. I like wordplay a lot. and this felt like a transmission from outer space like directly for me i really did feel like i can't believe this exists and i didn't know at the time how popular it was and i don't know if i would have liked or disliked that idea there was part of me that liked that this was just this box of book was i uncovering a gem or something i found out later and then my high school friends started reading it later and they'd get it in secondhand bookshops and comic book store and a couple of but like genre stops or whatever.

33:31And we realized like, okay, this is a cool thing. And then it became a bit of, I don't know, kind of a mark of like, do you get it or you don't? Yeah, it's a really, if you know, you know. Are you hip to the vibe or are you not? Are you a fruit who knows where their towel is or are you not, which we'll talk about here in a second. So, and then I read all four of the book. They were all there and I just blew through them. I guess you should know about the books. There's a, would you call it a cliffhanger at the end of Hitchhikers? Like it leads into the next, but there's no real story. Like you can keep going or you could stop.

33:59Like if you feel like you've got enough, you've gotten it. You're not going to miss anything. But if you want more, there's more.

34:04Jeff:Yeah. Classic radio serial situation. Like we'd like for you to come back tomorrow, but today you had a complete experience. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And you came to it a bit later, right? And you did audio first. I did much later, much later, because they were not just shoving this into the hands of adolescent girls in the early 90s. It was pretty boycotted, as you said. So I knew that the guys had read it. My husband, Bob, had read it by the time we met in college. He read it as a teenager. And I knew he liked it. He talked about it. But I just had never, like, I just, nobody recommended it to me.

34:36Jeff:I knew it was a big deal, but it didn't feel relevant to my reading life. And then I had heard that the audiobook read by Stephen Fry was stellar. We were going on a road trip in 2014. I checked my reading spreadsheet, and we listened to the Stephen Fry audiobook production. And I was like, oh, I get it. I don't know if I would have had the same experience just picking up a paperback, As an adult, this feels to me like such a formative book to read as a young person, that both that audiobook experience and then this reading of it in print are more anthropological for me than they are about a direct relationship to it.

35:13Jeff:But I get it. And I do have a lot of affection for that audiobook. It was a really fun moment. We will still walk through our house just occasionally going, Slotty Bartfast! Yeah, the Fry narrated audiobook is wonderful. As I said, I had never listened to it before this. I've reread the book several times. But it does help you. I think if you're coming into it real cold, it can take you a little while to figure out what the tone is. Because it's not as silly. It's whimsical and inventive and strange. But from the beginning, the opening few pages about the bulldozer are pretty straight ahead. It's ironical, but you don't get a sense of what you're in for until you're on the Vogon ship.

35:55Like, you really don't. So I think it can be hard to find your footing. Whereas the performance by Frye, you get much more of a wry English. This is comedy. There's a version of this that's like a tragedy, right? The earth is destroyed, Rebecca. Right? Like, that just happens in, like, the first five pages. Like, what the hell do you do with that? And the audio gives you a little more clues. So it's just super fun and funny. Like, I think that's the most, the surface level, but also a totally fine takeaway. But it's about some stuff. right here. What is this about? What is his point of view? What are we looking for?

36:30What is all the joking at the center of the joking Tootsie Roll pop? What is it here?

36:34Jeff:It is, I think, a really interesting question to ask because it's not totally obvious if you're just cruising through the fun and silliness, but the book is not without its arguments. I think Douglas just makes them in such a fun way that the pointedness gets a little hidden or subsumed. But to me, it feels like Parks and Rec flavored, like gentle poking fun at things like bureaucratic silliness. Like it's not anger fueled criticism like Pynchon or Vonnegut. Some of the guys were writing at the same time that Adams was, but he is pointing at some of the same things that like the way that governments run is frustrating and often doesn't make sense.

37:13Jeff:Politicians can be really dumb and performative. And it can just feel like maybe it's all meaningless out there in the world. And yet we all continue to try to make a go of it and to try to protect the Earth, to try to keep our houses going. People are unhappy and maybe that's kind of their own fault. And Adams is sort of in on all of that. There's jokes about that it turns out that humans are not the most intelligent creatures on Earth. It's the dolphins and humans aren't running Earth. It's mice. It's the lab mice who are in charge the whole time. There's a real, I think, just attempt to expand the aperture of how we look at and talk about humanity.

37:54Jeff:I think Adams had a great affection for humans, but could see the flaws and was kind of holding up a mirror, but in a gentle and funny way. Yeah. And not unlike Python, it's extremely interested in deflating whatever monuments there are to seriousness, to importance, to received and unalterable vessels of meaning, import or status. Right. The Department of Silly Walks or the Holy Hand Grenade. Like they're they're very much rotating around like that's all stuff that is just kind of made up. And let's talk about how it's made up and contingent. I think what's interesting about Adams is like once in comedy of all of that style, once you do that, then what is left?

38:42What's left after you do the deflating? After you take the piss out of that thing, what is left of the vessel in which was containing the piss? Like how much of our lives and our social structures are held up by piss? And once you do that, I think we reckon with like maybe the bleak atheist. He's not existentialism. He's not a nihilist here. That's not what this book is. But there is a, oh no. Now what? It's just us here. If the life, the universe, and everything is unknowable or random and it's just us, suddenly it's our job to figure out how to make meaning, right? And I think that's kind of where we end up with these books.

39:20Jeff:And he completely refuses to make the meaning for us. Yes, there's no answer here. Yeah, the ambiguity behind the question and answer drives some people totally nuts. Fans have posited all kinds of guesses about what question could have yielded the answer 42. And Adams stated repeatedly that there was no answer, no matter what. But if you're curious, you can Google your way to all sorts of ridiculous and elaborate theories. fans have come up with. There's just a real desire from outside to make this book be about something in addition to what it's already about. So there's also real comparisons to Alice in Wonderland, I think just because it's playful and he's got these silly sounding creatures.

40:01Jeff:But Douglas Adams was on record as adamantly disliking Lewis Carroll's work and sort of not wanting to play in that same field. But he is turning like bureaucracy and incompetent politicians. They're just this eternal and endless source of frustration and of comedy at the same time. And there's kind of an eerie, Trumpy energy to Zaphod Beeblebrox. But that's a nice reminder that these are not new characters on the world scene or on the political stage. These kinds of characters and these kinds of people exist, and they are ridiculous and absurd, and they do end up with power and in positions where they can cause a lot of harm.

40:42Jeff:And maybe we can, as you were saying, deflate those balloons a little bit by just calling it out, pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Yeah. And, you know, if the human gesture or the sentient being to sentient being gesture, not to be specious here, that initiates the book is Ford looking out for his friend Arthur. He didn't have to say to Arthur, you know, let's get out of here. Right. He does. He takes him with him. He doesn't have a plan. Arthur's existence is more of a hindrance to Ford's own survival than it would be if he weren't there. But I think there is a sort of fellow feeling like, okay, if it's a random absurd universe, let's at least have a pint together while we navigate it.

41:20And while we're going through the multiple dimensional space initiated by use of the improbability drive that powers the heart of gold. Like at least let's do it together. Those are words you all just said. I think that's it, Rebecca. I kind of think that's it. I think so. But it's like remarkably powerful and familiar at the same time.

41:35Jeff:Life is absurd and guided by happenstance, but it's not presented in a doomy, everything is pointless way. And if it's not that everything is pointless, even though life is absurd and guided by happenstance, what does that mean? And what kind of life does that make for us? And I agree. I think Adams is pointing at a like, just like help each other out and let's go on the ride together. You have a really good point about how Adams nailed how annoying AI and smart technology would be to interact with. That seemed to me the most prescient point. Sort of the operating system, whatever that governs, that you interact with in the heart of gold, which is the ship that Zafvod Biblok steals, you can download different personalities and each one is sort of more insufferable or at least differently insufferable than the last.

42:22And I think the part of that is also how even as great as this technology stuff or as powerful, I guess, as technology is, it's still beings that have to interact with them. And we're flawed, ergo, they're going to be flawed. Like they build this computer to get the right answer, but they don't think to ask the right questions. And then they don't keep track of what's going on and tell the Vogons, don't destroy that planet because we're working on something here. And so we just keep getting in our own way. So I would be super curious what atoms would think of AI in its current instance. My guess would be, and tell me if I'm wrong, is like, that seems pretty great, but people are still going to people.

42:55So I don't know what to tell you.

42:56Jeff:Right. I think you would be unimpressed with the current state of it. But like we're using it for dumb things for the most part. Right. But if you've had like a shouting match with the AI that answers the phone when you try to call the pharmacy and get a refill. Or that Siri will just pop on your watch when you don't even want to and you're not even saying anything remotely. The conversations that they have with the onboard computers and with Marvin, the paranoid android, like really, just really nailed how all this technology is supposed to be fancy and supposed to be smarter than we are, but can be super obnoxious and glitchy.

43:32Jeff:And like, it costs you time in the long run. And maybe you're going to die before you get to that other planet. Yeah. It's funny that we were talking about braiding sweet grass earlier, because I think if Adams and Kimmerer have a shared affinity at their core, it might be this, is that humans thinking of self as the center of whatever, just that doesn't work. Adams became a noted conservationist. And the book he was most proud of was actually a book about conservation and nature. The name escapes me. I've never read it and I've always meant to. But there is a very much of, if we take some of the piss out of humanism, meaning humans are the center of the universe, there's a lot of interesting things that descend from that.

44:11And one of that is we got to think differently about how we interact with the world and what we do to the world and to each other at the same time.

44:17Jeff:The conservation book is called Last Chance to See. It came out in 1990 and he wrote it with zoologist Mark Cowardine documenting travels to find endangered species. Yeah. And I'm sure things are better since he wrote that book. we've figured out luckily you know what it's about the smallness of humanity and our own experience one of my favorite modes is adam's describing how big the universe is like this comes up over and over again and the logic thing that follows that is like there's a lot out there that isn't us and we don't even know we don't know so humans can't just be that important right unless you think we're the only ones out there the next step is there's a lot of things that are not us that are teeming and sentient and have you know experiences and cultures and foibles and if you admit that then that gives you kind of a huge perspective that is radical in its own way it's certainly you know radical to a christian tradition or really any earth earthly religious i don't know how say buddhism deals with the idea of life on other planets i don't want to speak to that but most of them are pretty how we live with ourselves on this planet earth and adam is like well there's a lot out there man like so much we can't even think about how big it is so we really don't matter all that much.

45:24These things that we think are so, so important, most of it is just nothing. And that's interesting. And he loves ideas and science and nature and math and physics. I thought he was like a computer engineer guy when I was doing the bio research. Oh, he's an English major, just like the rest of us dummies, but really developed a love, an interest in science and nature and thinking about probability. And I think he weaves ideas of science in very naturally and funny in a way that's not off-putting at all.

45:52Jeff:Yeah, and it's not wonky at all, especially because a lot of the science is made up that you just kind of can let it gloss over and like, OK, we're on this ship. There's an improbability engine. It helps if you understand probability. You're fine if you don't. Right. A straight thought, Rebecca. What had occurred to you as we were having this experience? I said it in the intro, but like sure sounds to me like Douglas Adams invented the smartphone. The Hitchhiker's Guide really sounds like it. This tiny device that has a bunch of icons on a screen and you can tap it and learn whatever you want about all the places in the world.

46:25Jeff:Just all the tech stuff is really interesting. The promise of the smartphone, because that's what we thought when we were getting the first iPhone, you could know anything. We don't use it for that. We're dumber than ever. And we have the sum total of human experience available to us. And we use it to scroll like people doing dances, which is fun and fine. But it does bring home to me. It's like we do actually have the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on our phone. And most of us use it for things, literally anything other than that is what we use it for. That sounds like a very Adams-y intake, actually.

46:53It does. You do have all the information available to anyone that's ever existed in your phone pocket, and you're looking at people who are AI influencers that are yassifying themselves. What a disturbing thought that is. Did I use that right? Did I get that right at all? I'm not sure that I did.

47:10Jeff:I just really am delighted to hear you say yassifying. Yeah. I've got to be careful out there. Right. My knife skills are just good enough to hurt myself with when it comes to knowledge. I like spent a lot of time reading this wondering if Douglas Adams would have been a good hang or totally insufferable. And I think I landed on good hang by the end of his career, but maybe insufferable as a younger man. And I will also fully admit that this is projection about the boys I knew when I was a young person who were obsessed with this book. Like it attracts or it used to attract a certain flavor. And not all of them were that way, but enough of them were.

47:48Jeff:Like enough of them became Elon Musk to be like, are we sure? That's really well said. We didn't do a great job. And I'll speak for us here. And this is not a defense, but a reason. I think the trick we missed is the point we were just talking about, which is we thought if we were on the Adams train, then we did have it figured out. But the Adams train is really about humility. We missed that part. We thought it was being about smart and snide. It is not about that. It is realizing no matter how smart and snide you are, you still don't get it and the universe is big and you should still be a reasonable person.

48:22So I apologize. It's tough out there for 14-year-olds, but still. Yeah.

48:27Jeff:And then I also noticed in my research, the book has been translated into dozens of other languages. And I really could not stop thinking, like, what would it be like to read this in like Chinese or Hebrew or a language that is so different from English? How does the wordplay work? What would a translator have to do to capture that? How do you translate whimsy from one language into another and capture the vibe of something like not just a pan-galactic gargle blaster, but the improbability engine and the feeling of these politicians? politicians. And some of that is also just specifically Western culture, you know, like 20th century Western culture.

49:11Jeff:How does that adapt to readers around the world? I couldn't find anything from a reader outside of like the US or Britain really talking about the experience of Adams, but I would love to. Yeah. What are the Chinese characters for Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster? Do you have to make some up? Like, I don't know how you've been doing that or you're writing in Romanized language. Let's see. I've got here. Yeah. Adams would have loved Wikipedia, would have hated social media, and would have been unbelievable at Twitter in the heyday of Twitter. Those are some of my thoughts. The one-liners are tremendous.

49:41We'll get to favorite quotes here, but I will just sometimes go read Douglas Adams' one-liners just for fun. And I don't say that of many writers.

49:50Jeff:And you have something here in Stray Thoughts that I actually was going to hit in hot takes, so I think we should just mention it. The corner that Welcome to Night Vale stands on in the podcasting universe, it owes a huge debt to Douglas Adams, but I think he would have been on that corner had he lived into the podcasting age. Yeah. I was thinking about those critical roles. I don't know much about them that are Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, essentially. I think he would have had a lot of fun with something like that at the same time. Stray thought that, I don't know, maybe I could have, is there a model for how to be in the universe here?

50:21We're not supposed to be Ford Prefect or Zaphad or Trillian or Marvin or Slotty Bar. I don't think there's a real answer. Much like there's not an answer to the question. We don't really get a model for, okay, if all of this stuff is absurd and everyone sort of is an idiot across the galaxy, even pan-dimensional mice travelers, even if they screw it up, what the hell are we supposed to do with it? I don't think there is an answer. I'm not really sure. The only thing I get is if someone's planet is about to get destroyed and they're your friend, you take them with you. That's all I've got. Everything else is, I don't know, is beyond my understanding.

50:55Not a bad moral. No, no, it's not bad. And maybe that's enough, certainly. Yeah, you have this point. Imperial Galactic Government is 100 % the title Trump would choose for himself. Luckily, Zaphod, we're given to understand, is maybe more subversive than that, but he doesn't know why because anyway, we're getting into details of that.

51:11Jeff:But yeah, President of the Imperial Galactic Government, like right up there with Supreme Commander of Allied Forces. That's a great job title. Supreme Commander of Allied Forces of Europe. What a job Ike had. And then became president, which was a comedown after Supreme. Yeah, I think this is pretty. I also wondered if this didn't exist today and it presented as a book, I think it still hits. It would be a little bit different. But one thing that translates is usually just it's funny. They're jokes. They're jokes on jokes on jokes. I think humor works. And I was talking to a friend who owns a bookstore.

51:44Jeff:We were talking about Dungeon Crawler Carl, and he said that they are hand-selling Hitchhiker's Guide as a read-alike for the people who are powering through. Now there's eight Dungeon crawler carl books but want more in that zone of funny sci-fi and so so it is still hitting i think you're right i think there's something timeless about it um we've kind of danced around i think notable quotes may be the best way to talk about this book because it's so you know like i talked about the opening is sort of fractal where you get versions of the same thing each sentence is in a way in miniature what adams does right like you can kind of divine the whole from the part, actually, as they're going to try to do to Arthur Dent's brain at the end.

52:24I was just trying to think. That's actually an interesting comparison there. Where do you want to start with, Rebecca?

52:29Jeff:Well, let's just start with never change Goodreads. Oh, yes. This is so funny. The most live, laugh, love quote is the one they pick out. They always will. The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually leave. Which is a line in this book, but is definitely not meant to go in earnest. Yes. Some of my favorites, bureaucratic cock-ups, angry men lying in mud, indecipherable strangers handing out inexplicable humiliation, and unidentified army of horsemen laughing at him in his head, what a day. Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so. And then when they land on Magrathia, the planet where they used to make other planets for rich people, Ford Prefect, a man after my own heart, an alien man after my own heart, I guess, looks around and says, desolate hole, if you ask me, not even a hot dog stand in evidence.

53:32it's just so unnecessarily funny at times like yeah i'm not sure what planet is but like it's where they happen to have the english words easter in france but they mean completely different things and it's like it just so happens on this planet the word easter means small round and flat i'm like or no small brown and flat i'm like what i i was i stared at that i was like what does that mean it's just funny it's just unnecessarily creative yeah you've probably seen things

53:57Jeff:branded with Don't Panic. That's a big one. That's what's written on the cover of Hitchhiker's Guide. This description of Zaphod Beeblebrox and the utility of politicians stood out to me. Only six people in the entire galaxy understood the principle on which it was governed. And then later on, the qualities he, Zaphod, is required to display are not those of leadership, but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason, the president is always a controversial choice. Always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it. Douglas Adams, welcome to 2026.

54:32Yeah. I was going to shout out the first line, if we do like a mini close reading moment for here, just to see a couple of things. This is not the first line. This is the first two sentences. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose eight descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. So, A, funny, right? But also, look how he puts humanity in this unimaginably large...

55:07He starts big and narrows and narrows and narrows it down. And he does this several times where we'll get big descriptions that circle and circle and circle and end at a really specific, almost understated sort of denouement at the end of it. And it's cool. It's just interesting to see him do this over and over again. But also he's a funny guy, but those are quite beautiful sentences. It's kind of wonderful and awe-inspiring. He can do that if he wants to. He sort of doesn't want to, but that sort of serious, in the serial comic-ness that he's doing, that's the serial part. And the comic is digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

55:45And like really pinpointing, we care about these small technological advancements still going on. And, but he's also indicted in this because he's a huge lover of technology himself. So he's not outside of this. I guess that's one thing to say about him too. I don't think, I don't feel, I guess you tell me differently. I don't feel that he is outside of the critique of humanity.

56:04Jeff:Yeah. And I think there's like, there are other versions of critique of humanity that are really negative in the way that they do. Hey, look how small humans are. Like get a hold of yourselves and have some humility. We're just these tiny people on this tiny rock floating through space. But his is really warm and affectionate. And there is like an innate humility, I think, to the approach. And he knows that he's part of it. But it's more of a like, look at these silly humans doing this thing. Look at us apes at the same time. Also, I want to introduce, if people don't know this literary term, the lightote, which is kind of an opposite of hyperbole, which is exaggeration for effect.

56:40So this is something he does a lot. So like digital watches are a pretty neat idea. That's an understatement of humans' fascination with technology and our own sort of techno fascination. So you might look for that. It's a real hallmark of a lot of British humor that to do these little understatements like, well, that was rather difficult, wasn't it? It's like when you just got your arm. It's only a flesh wound from Monty Python when the Black Knight gets his arm. It's only a flesh wound. That is a light. It's understatement for effect. So you can take that with you. Welcome to Jeff's Literary Terminology Corner.

57:10I think people might like that. I assume people know what hyperbole is. Maybe I shouldn't. that's just exaggeration for effect. So there you go. Where else do you have more quotes? I'm sorry. I'm looking at my own documents here.

57:20Jeff:This one I think really kind of sums it up. It comes near the end of the book. Well, I mean, yes, idealism. Yes, the dignity of pure research. Yes, the pursuit of truth in all its forms. But there comes a point, I'm afraid, where you begin to suspect that if there's any real truth, it's that the entire multidimensional infinity of the universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. If I write a band, I think a bunch of maniacs because everyone wants to name their thing after Douglas Adams things. I might choose a bunch of maniacs. I have a similar one. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

57:59Great.

57:59Jeff:Just great stuff. This one, I think this was my conversion moment. It happens early. And I think about this all the time and it still makes me laugh. This is describing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro-submason electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it.

58:26Okay.

58:28Jeff:Several inconveniently large buildings. It's several inconveniently large buildings. I think this is Zaflod Beeblebrox talking to an alien saying, listen, three eyes, he He said, don't you try to out weird me. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.

58:45It's a good time. You guys are so unhip. You wonder if your bum, it's a wonder your bums don't fall off. That's just straight up wordplay. Like you just are getting better at that. Let's see. Do you remember them? I don't have it written down the exact moment here, but he's describing the Vogon fleet, like these giant immobile hanging in space. And he says, they hang there in space exactly the way in the way bricks would not. I'm like, I didn't know you could do that. I don't even know what that is.

59:10Jeff:Girl, winter is so last season. And now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders. That perfect hang on the patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope? It's time for a little in-person spring treat. it's time for a trip to Ross work your magic so good so good so good everything you want for summer is at Nordstrom Rack stores now and up to 60 % off stock up and save on the brands you love like Vince, Sam Edelman, Frame and Free People join the Nordiclub to unlock exclusive discounts shop new arrivals first and more plus buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free great brands, great prices that's why you Rack Expedia and Visit Scotland invite you to come experience the beauty that awaits in Scotland.

1:00:15Jeff:The sweep of wild coastlines, quiet locks and untamed landscapes. Fresh cuisine that feels rooted in the land. Come experience the kind of stillness that stays with you long after you leave. Plan your Scottish escape today at Expedia.com slash VisitScotland. Let's see. What a fun line. There is an art, it says, or rather a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. That's just unbelievable. What else, Rebecca? Do you have anything you want to get into? I mean, we could do quotes all day long. Yeah, I know. It's a real problem. That's a good sampler of what you're going to get with Douglas Adams.

1:00:56Rebecca, is this for you? Why might it be for you?

1:00:58Jeff:I mean, you're into whimsy. You like silly inside jokes, but also you like science and nature and ideas and certainly wordplay. You're here for a good time. Right. Maybe not if you like detailed world building, as you say. You're looking for a clean resolution. If it's going to drive you nuts that the answer is 42 and you don't know what the question is, don't do that. If you care about plot, I'll say if you're a plot-driven person, I guess not unlike some of the other things we've talked about. if you're not willing to entertain the idea of a godless, non-supernatural universe, that's going to be a tough beat for you because that's not what's going on.

1:01:34Jeff:And I guess if satire and humor are challenging for you to read, if you find yourself to be a pretty literal reader, the book is just not going to work. And I will just say that eventually Douglas Adams writes female characters with some fullness. That is not what happens here. That's just something to know. Yep. They're not even caricatures. Like Trillian is our one really female character and she gets a few lines, but there's not much to her. And it's not a character driven thing. Like Arthur Dent is not much of anything. Even Ford Prefect is not much of a character, but Trillian, unfortunately, is even less of one.

1:02:06And so, Immortal Questions that Art asked Rebecca, which of these are primary here? I'll read them. What is the good life? How do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the uncertainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no?

1:02:26Jeff:Kind of all of them. Primary here. That's the problem. Most of these books we're going to talk about are going to whack a lot of these moles. Which mole gets the biggest whack? You know, well, what else might there be is a question that Arthur Dent had not been asking himself until he's on these ships. But then it's right up in front of him. That's a really good point. He's not looking out there for a good. In fact, he wants to stay at home, much like Bilbo Baggins. He just wants to sit around and do his thing. But the universe has other plans. But it becomes kind of a tour of what else there, in fact, is in this world.

1:02:57Jeff:A little bit of what's the deal with good and evil, but mostly it's Adams pointing back to, like, humans. Just humans, man. What do you want? People are going to people. I think there's really a lot of what do I owe my neighbor and a side of what is the good life. A little bit. I think that's right. I think the what else might there be is fascinating because it's not the answer to that question is not a truthful one. It's an imaginative one that if we take it as read that the universe is bigger than we can imagine and ergo can hold more than imagine. That says there's so much more that we don't we don't even know what we don't know to quote that old that old saw.

1:03:33And then what is the ramification of that? It has to be humility. That's the logical conclusion of that reality. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? I think this is the one that is the least about art and writing of sort of anything we've read so far.

1:03:46Jeff:I agree. Yeah. Not very hard. Could you get most of the gist from watching the Signal adaptation? Maybe. The journey to the film adaptation was really long and winding. The author bio at the back of my paperback copy even jokes about it and says, after Douglas died, the movie went out of development hell into the clear uplands of production. So that film came out in 2005. To quote the book, it's mostly harmless, but I would say, nah. It squeaks by on Rotten Tomatoes. It has a rating of 61 % where 59 or lower is rotten. So it's like right on the threshold. However, Sam Rockwell plays Zafod Beeblebrox and there's a super cut of all of his lines from the movie.

1:04:30It's unbelievable casting. Yeah.

1:04:31Jeff:It's like 12 minutes of Sam Rockwell, and that is delightful. So we'll put a link to that in the newsletter. There's also an updated live action series that's been in development at Hulu since 2019, but it was supposed to air in 2020 and it's never surfaced. So we are back in development hell. I don't think this is easily adaptable. adaptable. The coincidence here is that the signal adaptation is actually the book because it's adapting the radio play. So that's weird to say out loud. I have a theory to run by you about why the film screen adaptations are so tricky. It is a comedy masquerading at sci-fi.

1:05:10In order to put it on screen, you've got to do all these set pieces and CGI and costume design. When really, when it comes down to it, these are funny sentences and ideas on paper. And that is enough. You get in everything that you're going to do on film is going to get in the way of that and detract from that. So I just think it works.

1:05:30Jeff:When we talk about like, if you were going to adapt it into a movie, a musical, a TV series, or the Muppets, like you could do this in a Futurama type animated series, capture the zaniness, the colorful characters. Futurama, like almost definitely influenced by Hitchhiker's Guide. It's impossible to imagine that those creators don't know this book. And The Muppets would be a chaotic blast, but it really is grounded in the language. For as much as it's not about art, it is really grounded in the writing. Yeah, Futurama. I've never been much of an animated comedy person. I don't really know why.

1:06:04It feels like I should be. I present as a comedy animated Simpsons Futurama BoJack person. I'm really not. But Futurama, the little I know of it, it almost seems like someone like, Like, what if we made Hitchhiker's Guide and The Simpsons? What would it actually look like? And it certainly looks like. I love the idea of Kermit as Arthur Dent, sort of getting pulled along. And then I didn't really do the rest of my casting. I think you probably make Ford Prefect the one human, right? This is our conceit with the Muppet versions. Like, you have the one human. Because he's the central character on the humans and everything.

1:06:35Jeff:Zaphod's got two heads and three arms. So he's got to be. Maybe use a couple of Muppets. Like, that's both Gonzo and Fozzie. Is Zaphod Beeblebrox? Something like that. And certainly we know there's depressed characters in Marvin, the paranoid android. There's so much trivia because this has become such a sort of holy document to a certain kind of techno-atheist libertarian, unfortunately. Where do you want to go? Well, let's start with my favorite fact about this. Slarty Bartfast, who is one of the villains insofar as there are any, was originally named Farty Fuckborls. Amazing. Those are with P.H.'s?

1:07:13Sensors, A.I.?

1:07:14Jeff:P-H-A-R-T-I-P-H-U-K-B-O-R-L-Z. But it didn't get by the BBC Standards Department for obvious reasons. I mean, one of the great namers, I would like to see in the great, if heaven exists and I get to just make things, I would like to see Thomas Pynchon and Douglas Adams in a character name off. Like kind of a rap battle, eight mile style, but of naming characters. That's what I would like to see right now. It's so interesting because they were writing at the same time. So it's not like one of them was reading the other one. They were just doing this simultaneously. He doesn't name check the great TP.

1:07:50I mean, he's a Vonnegut, Jane Austen. Like, it's kind of interesting to look at his. He doesn't name check.

1:07:54Jeff:Yeah, but farty fuckborals, absolutely the best thing I learned in my Googles. But a whole bunch of other fun things. In 1974, Adams wrote a script for a sci-fi vehicle that would have starred Ringo Starr of the Beatles. He was a huge Beatles fan. It was rejected by all the American networks, so that never happened. And then, as you were saying, this has inspired so many things in art and culture. Marvin, the Paranoid Android, was the inspiration for the radio song called Paranoid Android and the album OK Computer because it referred to the way that Zafot addressed the onboard computer on Heart of Gold and totally predicted how we were all going to later talk to Google and Alexa and Siri.

1:08:35Jeff:Two asteroids have been named after Arthur Dent and Douglas Adams. Two fish species and a moth species named after them. Google's artificial intelligence research lab is called Deep Mind. That was named an homage to Deep Thought. Just a ton of stuff here. It's amazing. You have this note here, and I saw this too. So there's a bit about Tau's, about how it's the most important thing you can take with you because it's so useful, which is a wonderful little Adams being Adams set piece. But this came a real experience when he was on vacation in Greece, and he could never find your towel. And I have found when traveling with children, a towel-like object is extremely useful.

1:09:12And I could add a few more uses if they ever asked me to expand on that. Towel Day is the 25th, and that's shortly out of death in 2001. I don't know if we said he died of a heart attack. He was at the gym one day. Yeah, he's 49. One of those Widowmaker heart attacks are real sad.

1:09:26Jeff:And then there is a joke in the book about monkeys who want to talk to the intergalactic travelers about the script they're working on for Hamlet. And that set me down a rabbit hole. It's called the infinite monkey theorem. And I was just like, who came up with this that Douglas Adams was already talking about it in 1979? It's most often credited to a French mathematician named Emile Borle. And he used the scenario in a 1913 essay on probability and statistical mechanics. And then the specific monkey Hamlet phrasing was cemented in pop culture through Arthur Eddington, who used it in a book called The Nature of the Physical World.

1:10:07Jeff:So, I mean, that's the kind of stuff that Adams is paying attention to, like pretty high minded stuff that he's then distilling down into really funny work. That's an unbelievable shout from you. I had never thought about someone there had to be the first person to have the infinite monkeys. It never occurred to me to look at the wonderful idea. Emile Burrell, I mean, and probabilities, of course, hugely important to this book. Let's see. Hot takes. I do think that this is better as an audio experience. The text is fun, but Adams would have totally owned the podcasting corner, as we were saying, that Welcome to Night Vale ended up occupying.

1:10:44Jeff:And the audio book is just, it's so stellar. Yeah. I alluded to one of mine. this is dangerous reading for an aspiring creative person. It feels easy to imitate, but it's just super, super hard to do. Yeah, which is probably why Eric Smith is out there being like, don't pitch me on your hitchhiker's guide. Yeah, don't do that. Comparisons. I also was thinking a lot of, like, through this book, are we sure that Bader-Meinhof syndrome is bad? Because, like, it sounds like a really good time. Whatever Zaphod's qualities of mind might include dash bravado conceit. He was mechanically inept and could easily blow the ship up with an extravagant gesture, Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he had never really understood the significance of anything he did.

1:11:26Jeff:That sounds like a good time. I mean, ignorance is bliss is just another way of putting that. You know, bliss, maybe, you know, bliss is the opiate of bliss. I don't, I think I'm, apologies to Mark's there. I just have the Adams is up there with Dorothy Parker, P.G. Wodahouse, and Oscar Wilde is the funniest writers I've read. I think probably for me, the single funniest, the single hardest laughs or the multiple hardest laughs, probably top five of my 15 hardest laughs of reading is Douglas Adams saying things I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit a rat. Like, I don't know why that works for me.

1:11:57Every time I'm like, it's just so funny. It doesn't get any funnier than this, I don't think. Which makes the read-alikes both manifold and wrong because there is nothing like this. But if you're looking for things sort of like this. Rebecca mentioned Dungeon Crawler Carl. My closest actually spiritually and experientially reading is Tom Robbins, who was also a writer in the 70s, 80s, who really didn't have plots and wanted to explore ideas and zanies. He's much bawdier, more risque, let's say more embodied, if you hear what I'm saying about his subject matter. And I love Tom Robbins as well. Probably the other top five times I've laughed hard would be reading Tom Robbins' sentences and his stories.

1:12:38Who else do you have to hear?

1:12:39Jeff:Well, if you want to hear it for yourself, you can listen to a remastered edition of the original radio serial. It's available on Spotify. We'll put a link to that in the newsletter. I tried this. I found it a tough hang, just putting this out there. Okay, I didn't try it. That's good to hear. Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Pratchett was really heavily influenced by Douglas Adams. And I think a fun one, I don't know if she's read Adams, I assume so, is Beautyland by Marie Helene Bertino, where a young girl who thinks that she is an alien is growing up in the U.S. in the 70s, and she's sending back transmissions to her home planet about humans.

1:13:15Jeff:And it's stuff like, why did humans pick the loudest possible snack to watch at the movies? That's a very Adyam's observation. That's a great shout. Yeah. I also do think for a really darker side of the everything is absurd coin, You could go to Thomas Pinchon or Vineland specifically. There's a scene in Vineland where there's like a plane that maybe is flying next to aliens. And I thought a lot while reading this about like, what if they existed in the same universe? And it was Adams is aliens on that plane that Pinchon's characters were hanging out with. But that's a totally, it's a totally different vibe.

1:13:52I think it's pretty close. I mean, it's different, but very similar in tone and I think perspective, if not actually execution. But A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, 2014 debut science fiction novel. The main character joins a crew as a file clerk, kind of an underling, and they go throughout the galaxy exploring its manifestations. it's a little more focused on the found family aspects, but I think there's a lot of similarities. So if you like this, let's go through the universe and see its resplendent strangeness. It's pretty amazing too. Self-published, it has a not dissimilar story from a lot of the books we talk about that are surprises.

1:14:30I wonder, I think about Adams too, as the, as a self-published situation, given how hard he, what a hard time he had getting stuff off the ground. Would he have turned to self-publishing? I just don't know. Probably wanted to be on air. more than anything else. Cocktail party crib sheet, Rebecca, three to five takeaways for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

1:14:52Jeff:Well, to think that there's an actual question or answer here is to totally miss the point. Yes. So you can just toss that in if folks are talking about this. I think you're either really going to like this book or really not like it. I don't think there's much in between. I know there are people out there that don't like it. I don't really get it. I mean, that's one I just miss it. Like, I can't even see what I don't see about people that hate this. I mean, I can get that they don't like it as much as I do, but I don't see the other side of the coin. Me, but that's just, that's. Yeah, it just doesn't feel to me like something that you're kind of lukewarm on.

1:15:23Jeff:Like, I think you either really get it or you just don't get it. And it's a certain flavor of humor. And it's stealthily really insightful about human nature, as we've talked about. But just one extra quote that I pulled was, if they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. like this is why we got to just keep talking all the time can't can't be there in our own thoughts a hugely influential in sci-fi and tech spaces and i think as you say and that that most of them completely missed the point as you said above and the point being is that there sort of isn't one like there isn't a big grand story to be told that you can then you know i think of this as almost like i think people do like atoms washing like if you're working on ai for ibm and you name it deep thought i feel like they think like you're in on the joke but you actually don't get it the joke is not to work on that, right?

1:16:10You can't work. You don't get to be on the Atom side and work on AI machines. You just don't get to be. You have to understand that. But missing the point seems to be, well, techno evangelists sort of miss the point all the time, it seems to me. Zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10 with 10 being the highest. Historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read credit, no damn factor. Shockingly high on historical importance.

1:16:34Jeff:Yeah. I think a nine. It has to be an eight or nine. Yeah. just really launched a whole new thing. Are we going to find something more readable than this? If this isn't a 10, what is, Rebecca? That was my thought. Well, I do think it gets... If you want plot? If you want plot or... Like, if the silliness just doesn't work, like the tone is not going to... If you're not going to pick it up. And I do think clearly, because so many people misread it, that it's not... What's a 10 for readability? I'm not pushing back. It's sort of like, if this isn't a 10, what is a real... It's a non-rhetorical question.

1:17:09Have we done anything that has a higher Rehabilitation than this?

1:17:12Jeff:I'd have to check, but I think we gave To Kill a Mockingbird a 10. It's really straightforward. Yeah, okay. Adams is just not quite straightforward enough. Yeah. Current relevance of central questions. 10 or 0? Yeah, I think so. What is a central question? What is? There's 42. Let's go with 42. There we go. That's the 42. Oh, sorry. We both did 42. a book nerd read could unfortunately low well it might be higher now that it once was yeah i think this is generational if you are a young let's say you're 48 you get no points for having read but if you're like a young millennial or younger it's less common to have read your 45 year old lady 14 yeah it's all over the place this one's hard to pin down yeah i'm gonna the Oh, damn factor.

1:18:05Jeff:Okay, yeah, we'll just put it in the middle. Well, it can't be a 10 because it's not Shakespeare. Eight and a half? Sure. When it's funny, it's really... If it's the funniest writer I've ever read and funny is worth anything, it has to be an eight and a five. And when it just cracks open young readers in that way, the oh, damn factor is mostly for our younger selves here, I think. Yeah. Well, that's our show. That's been a wonderful time. Worth a reread. We haven't said this. It's super short. It's like 250 pages. is you can get through it in a couple hours. It reads like a house on fire. You can go to patreon.com slash digital well read for detailed show notes, our free newsletter and membership options, which is including our forthcoming guided read along series.

1:18:47We'll announce that over there first. It also includes an option, one of the levels you can hear us talk in our office hours in which we're going to do character rankings and awards. We've realized that we don't spend a lot of time talking about character, but character is really fun to talk about. We didn't have a structure or section for it. So we made one up and when in doubt, make a ranking as your structure for anything. And we're also going to do some awards. Our first one will be for hitchhikers, and we're going to be kind of making it up as we go. So if you want some feedback, we're going to talk about structure and what we want to do with that over there.

1:19:19If people want to find us elsewhere, Rebecca, where they can find us.

1:19:21Jeff:You can find us on all the socials at Zero to Well Read Podcast. Of course, you can email us at Zero to Well Read at bookriot.com. Thanks to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read, and we are a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Jeff, do you know where your towel is? You know, I like to think, if not actually in my heart, I'm a fruit who knows where my towel is. Thanks so much, everybody, Rebecca. Thanks for doing this one. This was a ton of fun. It was a good time.