I had to re-read this because I'm insane but I'm happy to be so because I still loved it.Total truth time: it's not quite as funny or as sharp in the individual zinger lines as Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, but the long-running story gags are fantastically wicked and cruel and even profoundly sad.It's also more of an adventure tale for Dirk later on, but primarily, it's all a mystery. Sometimes, the plot is as much of a mystery, too, but I don't care. :) After the rising of new gods i...

This is the second book about Dirk Gently, the holistic private investigator. A seriously underestimated series (or what was to become a series, I'm sure). In this second volume, Dirk is not really at his best. Something is wrong and he can't put his finger to it. To make matters worse, a very well off client, who promised to voluntarily pay for all sorts of quirks, is not just crazy as Dirk had thought, but ends up dead (money sure does seem to have a way of getting away from Dirk). Dirk's horo...

So the title The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is so fantastic! And the randomness, quirkiness and interesting meditations of Douglas Adams's detective, Dirk Gently, matches the tone set by that title. The novel even features the Norse Gods in the modern world (reminding me of Neil Gaiman's American Gods). Definitely a different take on Thor than you'll see in the superhero movies. The mystery/plot(s) are less the point here than simply taking the journey. In that respect, there's a commonality...

Almost entirely, but not quite, unlike tea–I mean, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There is no way easy way to say this, but despite ingredients that should be interesting, it just fails to work for me. However, unlike American Gods, which resembles it more than a bit, it is entirely more palatable and has 100% less offensive scenes, so there is that (I may have some trouble with statistics here). Nonetheless, because it is contains some Douglas Adamsisms that have stuck with me through th...

Unlike his “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series (a collection of humorous vignettes without much of a plot, continuity, or character development), Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently series (two novels and some sketches for a third one, included in the “Salmon of Doubt”) is in fact literature of the first degree. In the second novel, “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul,” Dirk Gently, a private “holistic” investigator (an eccentric slob, perpetually broke, capricious, silly, and wonderfully insightfu...

This used to be one of my favorite books when I was 18 (that was more than a few years ago *cough* thirty something *cough*). I was definitely going through a ‘I love everything Douglas Adams’ phase at the time and while I still like this book because sometimes the ridiculousness of the plot and randomness of how everything happens is still so much fun I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did back then.There are some great things in this. There is Dirk who is a funny and severely quirky character who

20,000 ratings, 500 reviews? Why bother to add another one to the masses? You don't need me to tell you to read this book, if you've gotten this far you're either already a fan of Adams or like me you picked it up because of the moody title and should have now found out that it's a sequel to the original Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Fear not, you don't really need to have read the other one to enjoy this additional piece of absurdity from Douglas Adams. Instead I'll make five points

Unfortunately, Adams' sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency isn't as tightly-written as its predecessor. On the sentence level, Adams is still writing furiously funny jokes, but The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul ends up feeling like first-class humor wrapped loosely around second-class plot and characters. Adams has been accused of writing punchlines rather than plots, and it shows in this book perhaps more so than anywhere else. I also thought the book's flow suffered greatly in p...

I love Douglas Adams but this book missed the mark a wee bit for me. Although the stuff with the gods was fun I'm not sure how much help Dirk was and the ending was a little abrupt. But otherwise, there were some funny parts.

Lots of hilarious moments, though the pacing's not quite up to the level set in the first Dirk Gently book. The ending especially feels rushed - he spends a long time building up this fantastic web of complexity, and then rips it down with a climax and ending that together are barely longer than "But it all worked out okay in the end."But, as a math student working through too many proofs right now, I really love Dirk's way of thinking! ...especially his reversal of Sherlock-Holmes-style logic:"...

This is very hard for me, you know? I love Douglas Adams; I adore his phrasing, his word structure, and how he manages to make things seem funny,ridiculous, menacing or heartbreaking. I've loved the Hitchhiker books, and he continues to be one of the writers I care for quite immensely.This is why rating this book as 3/5 is so sad for me, this book started off great, with plenty of intrigue and mystery, and a bunch of characters that seemed interesting and off their rockers (in other words, regul...

If this title does not speak to you, then perhaps this book is not for you. I loved it.

Once again, rather than attempt to describe the latest of holistic detective Dirk Gently's adventures, I will instead present a selection of completely random quotes from the book. They really have nothing to do with each other, but I like them."It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport.'Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness ari...

Adams' bizarre book is more of an adventure than a mystery, and more of a picaresque than an adventure. It's true, this plot wanders and is flimsy at times, but Adams always makes up for it with clever insights and hilarious jokes. Minor events mushroom at the end to unexpected relevance, a very bold literary move that would be a sign of laziness if these moves didn't work and we didn't recognize Adams' competence as a writer from the execution of his humor throughout. Fantasy readers and Adams'...

I have yet to see or hear a coherent explanation why American Gods breaks records, whereas this gem, which even Gaiman himself I think would agree is in quite a higher league, never did make a splash. Just because it's not set in America? That would be pathetic.

As much as I enjoyed ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’, I have to say that ‘The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul’ is the better book. The reason for that is simple – you get more Dirk for your pound! Whereas it was halfway through before this most intriguing of detectives put in an appearance in the first novel, here he arrives in Chapter Three – waging a war with his cleaner as to which of them is actually going to open the fridge door (something which hasn’t been done in over three month...

A hot potato, a new fridge - hand delivered from the black market - and a severed head on a record player. Dirk Gently is on a new assignment, or so it seems.Is it really possible that a blast in Heathrow T2 is an "Act of God" or is it just a neat and come-in-handy clause in the insurance policy?Is it true that you can´t get a pack of cigarettes after sunset anywhere in London and St Pancras Station resembles Valhalla? Have the old Norse Gods sold out, or been caught in a hostile takeover? And a...

Adams addiction to mocking the every day mundane and inane just really tickles me. Like, every single time, I'm laughing at simple irreverence. I feel like Adams was the type of man that you really wanted to avoid slightly annoying because you would end up in one of his books, in a section about bistro math, or how no culture has the term "pretty as an airport."LDTTS is a quick read, its hilarious, its probably the light-hearted thing that you are looking for that you dont even know you want.Als...

This is one of my favorite books of all time. I will re-read or re-listen to it at least once a year and even though I know the story backwards and forwards, it never fails to entertain me.

The back jacked of this book promised me it was "Funnier than Psycho" and "Shorter than War and Peace." Now, I thought that these were jokes. I assumed that that tag was cute and that it would be quite funny. In fact, funnier than Psycho is about as good as the humor was. It was there, but rarely very funny and generally simply kinda cute. It was in fact shorter than War and Peace. I didn't expect much for plot. It is a Douglas Adams book after all, but I had hoped for decent characters. Unfortu...

1 Jan 1988The travails of trying to order a pizza, Valhalla in London, and unexpected encounters with Thor. I loved it.16 September, 2012Tash talked me into watching Thor, which I enjoyed enormously. And it reminded me of Adams' Thor, committing an Act of (a) God, when he can't catch a flight to Oslo. More than thirty years later air travel has only become more annoying.It's still fantastically funny, but I'm aware of a sadness to it that I didn't notice on previous readings. The heroine is a wi...

I'm not sure whether this is the effect of not being jammed into half a train seat by someone twice the size of me, but The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul seemed less funny but more absorbing than the first book. It helped that it included Norse gods, I think. I had no idea that Douglas Adams had tangled with them.On the other hand, I don't really think that as much seemed to happen, somehow. Less plates seemed to be spinning. I think that was a good thing for the narrative, but it seemed to mak...

The one and only sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is funnier, at least in the first half, and no less eccentric than its predecessor. A favorite highlight here is the female lead character attempting to explain the concept of "humor" to the director of a psychiatric institute. Unfortunately in the second half humor is all but forgotten as Adams attempts to satisfactorily tie together all the crazy plot elements - attacking eagles, stubborn vending machines, murderous demons, bu...

AMAZE-BALLS. Douglas Adams's best work, hands down.So last year I read all of The Hitchhiker's Guide books and loved them, though by the last one you could tell Adams didn't want to write them anymore. I adored Adams's humor and style, so I was excited to read the two Dirk Gently books. The first book suffered for me a little bit because over the first third of the book was very disconnected. But in this one you can see the connections through the various plotlines early on. In some of Adams's o...

Dirk Gently is a "holistic detective" who makes use of "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things" to solve the whole crime, and find the whole person. He bills for everything but claims that he cannot be considered to have ripped anybody off, because none of his clients ever pay him. I can't speak for the first book, since I read out of order, but he certainly doesn't get paid in this one.I so wanted to give this book five stars. I love Douglas Adams' humor, and his Hitchhiker's series w...

How do you describe Adams' Dirk Gently books? I have a hard time not because they can't be genre-classified but because they don't fit any novel form out there. Stream-of-consciousness on the part of the author? Is Gently the main character? Who is the main character? What is going on? There's one thing going on, though--Adams does a lot of describing. It's a wealth of description. Plot? Pish-tosh! We don't need no stinking plot! That's not why you read an Adams novel anyway. So just let Adams m...

Dirk Gently is still not on the level of Hitch-hiker's Guide, obviously, but this sequel is a better read than the first. Easier to follow, and very funny, the story is intriguing. I do wonder though, with the irreverent Norse gods hanging around, did this or American Gods come out first?

I didn’t enjoy this nearly as much as Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It started off interesting, but for some reason I became progressively less interested as the story continued and I put the book down more and more frequently. I also didn’t find it as funny. It had humor, but it didn’t make me laugh as much. I think it intentionally took a more serious tone, which I might have appreciated better if I’d been more interested in the story. The first book had a mixture of elements from b...

[Short review from memory until I re-read at a later date](Memories of this is that it was extremely funny and very enjoyable. I can't imagine why I only gave it three stars, but there must have been a reason. In my head Dirk will always look like Stephen Mangan now.)

Not actually as funny or great as I had remembered, thought now I see I only gave it two stars the first time around so obviously I actually thought the same at the time too. Memory is a funny thing.