I thought that a good way to end the year and get back into blogging would be to do a series of reviews for all the books that I read for the Book Riot Read Harder 2018 challenge. An added benefit, there are 24 books so it will also be a good way to make sure I don't run out of ideas for Blogmas content like I did last year.
Category 1: A book published posthumously
The Salmon of Doubt
Author: Douglas Adams
Publisher: Del Rey
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: May 28, 2002
Page count: 298
Genres: science fiction, biography, comedy, mystery
Page count: 298
Genres: science fiction, biography, comedy, mystery
Date read: November 7, 2018
Number of times read: 1
Format: eAudio bookSource: Waterloo Public Library
Summary
Douglas Adams changed the face of science fiction with his cosmically comic novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its classic sequels. Sadly for his countless admirers, he hitched his own ride to the great beyond much too soon. Culled posthumously from Adams’s fleet of beloved Macintosh computers, this selection of essays, articles, anecdotes, and stories offers a fascinating and intimate portrait of the multifaceted artist and absurdist wordsmith.
Join Adams on an excursion to climb Kilimanjaro…dressed in a rhino costume; peek into the private life of Genghis Khan—warrior and world-class neurotic; root for the harried author’s efforts to get a Hitchhiker movie off the ground in Hollywood; thrill to the further exploits of private eye Dirk Gently and two-headed alien Zaphod Beeblebrox. Though Douglas Adams is gone, he’s left us something very special to remember him by. Without a doubt. -- via Goodreads
Douglas Adams changed the face of science fiction with his cosmically comic novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its classic sequels. Sadly for his countless admirers, he hitched his own ride to the great beyond much too soon. Culled posthumously from Adams’s fleet of beloved Macintosh computers, this selection of essays, articles, anecdotes, and stories offers a fascinating and intimate portrait of the multifaceted artist and absurdist wordsmith.
Join Adams on an excursion to climb Kilimanjaro…dressed in a rhino costume; peek into the private life of Genghis Khan—warrior and world-class neurotic; root for the harried author’s efforts to get a Hitchhiker movie off the ground in Hollywood; thrill to the further exploits of private eye Dirk Gently and two-headed alien Zaphod Beeblebrox. Though Douglas Adams is gone, he’s left us something very special to remember him by. Without a doubt. -- via Goodreads
Review
This book was published in 2002 after Douglas Adams passed in 2001. It's a strange book in that it's a mixture of bits of writing that were found after Adams's death and random interviews and pieces he'd written over the years. So with that in mind, it's both fiction and non-fiction. It's both autobiographical and a fantastical mystery. Now that it's been a few weeks since I read it and I'm sitting here thinking about how to review it I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. My coworkers and I were talking on Friday about Go Set a Watchman and how it's exploitative, and I've come to the conclusion that that's what's wrong with this book for me, it feels exploitative. It always feels weird to me to think that an author's desk gets raided after they pass and that the contents/manuscripts as fragmented, unfinished, and incomplete as they may be are then put together and sold as a complete book. It just feels weird to me. Now maybe I'm wrong, maybe there was something in his will and he was okay with that happening.
Now, let's move on, to the content of the book. The tributes at the beginning of the book from authors and celebrities who knew and worked with Adams were touching and funny. I think my favourite piece of the whole collection was the piece about the time Adams climbed Mount Kilimanjaro while wearing a rhino costume. That was pure comedic gold. At one point I think one of the stories was repeated twice? I can't remember totally at this point, but at the time I remember thinking "God, this story sounds very familiar." The way the pieces were organised were very slipshod and haphazard. I feel like this book really could have benefitted from much, much better editing than it seems to have had. They put it together more like a novel than an essay collection and I think that's to its detriment.
Obviously, the central piece of this book is supposed to be the unfinished manuscript of the titular Salmon of Doubt. This is the first 10 chapters of what had been throughout the previous portions of the book alternatingly identified as either a Dirk Gently vehicle, a potential Hitchhiker's sequel, or a completely unrelated new work. Have read and loved (most) of Adams's Hitchhiker books, and having recently read (and enjoyed less) the Dirk Gently books, that was what really intrigued me to select Salmon of Doubt as my option for this challenge. Prior to the discovery that it was published posthumously, I was intending to read Ian Fleming's Man with the Golden Gun which was also published after the death of its author. But I digress, back to Salmon of Doubt. In this version of the manuscript, the story is very clearly a Dirk Gently mystery. It's fantastical, with a hint of sci-fi. And honestly, the portion of the manuscript that is extant is, in my opinion, better than both of the previous Dirk Gently books put together. It wasn't as esoteric as Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and it was much less rambling than Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I'm not sure if having finished it would have ended up making it better or worse really. But I did enjoy reading it.
If you're looking for a proper Dirk Gently mystery or the mad-cap hijinx of the Hitchhiker's cast, then skip this book. But if you're just an overall fan of Douglas Adams's humour then you can't go wrong giving this book a shot.
This book was published in 2002 after Douglas Adams passed in 2001. It's a strange book in that it's a mixture of bits of writing that were found after Adams's death and random interviews and pieces he'd written over the years. So with that in mind, it's both fiction and non-fiction. It's both autobiographical and a fantastical mystery. Now that it's been a few weeks since I read it and I'm sitting here thinking about how to review it I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. My coworkers and I were talking on Friday about Go Set a Watchman and how it's exploitative, and I've come to the conclusion that that's what's wrong with this book for me, it feels exploitative. It always feels weird to me to think that an author's desk gets raided after they pass and that the contents/manuscripts as fragmented, unfinished, and incomplete as they may be are then put together and sold as a complete book. It just feels weird to me. Now maybe I'm wrong, maybe there was something in his will and he was okay with that happening.
Now, let's move on, to the content of the book. The tributes at the beginning of the book from authors and celebrities who knew and worked with Adams were touching and funny. I think my favourite piece of the whole collection was the piece about the time Adams climbed Mount Kilimanjaro while wearing a rhino costume. That was pure comedic gold. At one point I think one of the stories was repeated twice? I can't remember totally at this point, but at the time I remember thinking "God, this story sounds very familiar." The way the pieces were organised were very slipshod and haphazard. I feel like this book really could have benefitted from much, much better editing than it seems to have had. They put it together more like a novel than an essay collection and I think that's to its detriment.
Obviously, the central piece of this book is supposed to be the unfinished manuscript of the titular Salmon of Doubt. This is the first 10 chapters of what had been throughout the previous portions of the book alternatingly identified as either a Dirk Gently vehicle, a potential Hitchhiker's sequel, or a completely unrelated new work. Have read and loved (most) of Adams's Hitchhiker books, and having recently read (and enjoyed less) the Dirk Gently books, that was what really intrigued me to select Salmon of Doubt as my option for this challenge. Prior to the discovery that it was published posthumously, I was intending to read Ian Fleming's Man with the Golden Gun which was also published after the death of its author. But I digress, back to Salmon of Doubt. In this version of the manuscript, the story is very clearly a Dirk Gently mystery. It's fantastical, with a hint of sci-fi. And honestly, the portion of the manuscript that is extant is, in my opinion, better than both of the previous Dirk Gently books put together. It wasn't as esoteric as Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and it was much less rambling than Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I'm not sure if having finished it would have ended up making it better or worse really. But I did enjoy reading it.
If you're looking for a proper Dirk Gently mystery or the mad-cap hijinx of the Hitchhiker's cast, then skip this book. But if you're just an overall fan of Douglas Adams's humour then you can't go wrong giving this book a shot.
Overall Rating
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| 3.5 bolts |
I can't say I have read any of Douglas Adams work, not even the Hitchhikers series. I'm quite selective with my science fiction as it's not my favourite of genres but I always think I should check at least one book of Douglas Adams out
ReplyDeleteI feel you on that I am also very selective with my scifi. If you were going to read one of his you could get away with only reading the first Hitchhiker's book I think sweetie. I'd say you could borrow my copy if you wanted but I can't find it haha.
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