If you love Douglas Adams this book is an absolute must read. It's got some great incite into the man who could make a pot of petunias think to itself, 'Not again.' A large part of my enjoyment was finding out about Adams as a person, and in turn finding out that I've got some stuff in common with him. I mean sure I haven't ridden a stingray like he has or written the funniest books of all time and granted I'm not British, BUT we do make our tea the same way, we're both have the same religious b...

This technically is the 3rd book in the Dirk Gently series. Sadly, it's not really a Dirk Gently book. You see, before Douglas Adams could write/finish this third book, he died of a sudden heart attack in a gym in Santa Barbara in 2001.But he left behind fragments of chapters or chapters and their rewritings and a lot of other notes on his various computers. His wife, daughter, agent, editor, assistant and other people then pieced together what is now The Salmon of Doubt which would have been th...

I waited sixteen-and-a-half years to read this and I just about managed to get through it without bawling my eyes out. Douglas Adams was the first author to make me laugh uproariously, back when I was a wee nipper. Sure, Roald Dahl had given me a few chuckles, but it wasn't until I read Hitchhikers for the first time that I realised a book could make me laugh so much I nearly wet myself.As such, this was a bittersweet experience. Reading Adams' unpublished work, including several chapters of a n...

This partially posthumous volume consists of a collection of magazine articles, newspaper columns, interviews and such like, along with one short story (about a young Zaphod)originally published in the Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book...a copy of which I own...and the (very) incomplete conflated text of three versions of the third Dirk Gently's novel. This novel was abandoned whilst Adams was still alive, in favour of a 6th Hitchhikers' novel. Adams had decided that the material...

"Where do you get the ideas for your books?- I tell myself I cannot have another cup of coffee till I've thought of an idea."This book is such a beautiful tribute to the late Douglas Adams. The pieces in it are laugh out loud funny, deeply meaningful, and often poignant. Surely I am not the only person that cried reading "Sunset at Blandings"; the feelings that Douglas felt at losing one of his favourite authors are so reminiscent of what his fans must feel. This book is absolutely wonderful. Do...

Certainly a gem for all Douglas Adams fans, containing a collection of articles, speeches and short stories with a broad topic ranging from such as hiking up Kilimanjaro in a rhino-suit to how computers' keybords will look in the future. If you're familiar with Douglas's writing style, you'll recognise that he uses similar techniques when writing both long novels and short chronicles. The book is an opportunity to not only enjoy the writers ideas one last time, but also to get to know the person...

Readers beware: The Salmon of Doubt is not a single novel, but rather a collection of goods pulled from Adams' computer after his death--including a draft of the first few chapters of his next Dirk Gently story (also titled The Salmon of Doubt, thus the larger part of this collection's title). Also enclosed in this volume are a series of short stories, essays, travelogues, and other random snippets, some of which date back over a decade, and most of which have little to do with the next entry, e...

Well now I'm doubtful of salmon or is it something else, a brilliant book by the master himself. Dirk Gently is a fabulous character construct as is the interconnectedness of all things. A holistically great book - Read it!!

It's really amazing the amounts of nostalgia that can build up in a person's system before it kinda explodes into a kind of reverse word soup full of interviews, introductions, epilogues, and snippets of novels we wish we had but they were never penned because the author up and died on us.I'm writing of Douglas Adams, of course. I almost didn't re-read this one because I remember it WAS mostly just magazine articles and interesting early computer-tech stuff and ruminations on science, god, and o...

Very very fascinating but also very very sad. I think some of Adams' best writing is found within this work. Sadly, the publication of this book meant that there would be no more new Douglas Adams books.

What a delight to revisit the mind of Douglas Adams. I like that this is a collection of emails, speeches, one-liners, and rants. Yes, there's the start of a novel in there, that he may or may not have intended to call the Salmon of Doubt. The result is so much better than it sounds like it's going to be: Douglas Adams died, but his buddy knew his password and emptied his Mac onto a CD, the various unfinished writings were lightly edited and printed as this. But gosh, am I ever glad that they di...

This is a delightful and maddening book. This collection of essays, columns, speech transcripts and random musings was culled from Adams' computers after his tragic death at the age of 49. The collection offers new insight into one of the world's most gifted humorists, and there is both pleasure and education to be had in reading his thoughts on such diverse topics as music, atheism, evolutionary biology, conservation and computers.The last section of the book contains the beginning of an unfini...

A collection of Adams’ unpublished works, an unfinished Dirk Gently novel, magazine articles, letter, interviews, snippets. It could be more enjoyable with a much more composed editing and structuring.

I resisted reading this for a long time because I was under the misapprehension that it was merely a presentation of the sections of the Dirk Gently novel Adams was working on until his untimely death in 2001. Having seen multiple references to it in Neil Gaiman's excellent Hitchhiker's companion, Don't Panic, I finally broke down and got it from the library, and I was glad that I did.The last third of the book does indeed contain the unfinished Salmon of Doubt, but that was to my mind the least...

A kind of poor book which just happens to be filled with awesome. I'd really like a well-organized and indexed collection of all of Douglas Adams' short writings. Round up all the columns and editorials he wrote, the text he did for his websites, everything, and get it all tied up with a bow and some context. Salmon isn't that collection; the writings are just tossed into poorly-defined buckets with no real TOC to speak of (and let us not speak of indexes), and there's no real way to tell what's...

A collection of essays, speeches, ramblings unearthed on his hard drive(s), one short story culled from a BBC annual, and the titular unfinished Dirk Gently novel. The essays are breezy and witty, often lacking focus when discussing science and technology, but comprise (realistically) the most readable of his non-fiction output. There are some readers, yours included, who feel Adams spent himself on the Hitchhiker’s books: although the Dirk Gentlys were absurdist romps sutured with awesome logic...

I went into this thinking I was getting a 300 pg Dirk Gently story... guess I should have read some reviews of it first... cuz that is noty what this book was mostly. It was interesting but just not what I was hoping for.

In early 1998 (or was it ‘97?), I experienced one of the most heady experiences of my life. A literary idol approached me at a conference we were attending in France (it was in Cannes, but it was a media festival rather than the more famous annual event), invited me to join him at dinner and debate the existence of God. Douglas Adams, self-proclaimed radical atheist, wanted to consider God’s existence (or lack thereof) with me. As a minister, I’d like to write myself in as the hero and claim tha...

I don’t want to finish this book.I really don’t.If I finish this book that means I’ll have finished the last work of Douglas Adams. And since it is technically ‘unfinished’, that means I’ll actually need to acknowledge that he’s gone. Dead. Breathed his last. Snuffed it.Have you read anything by Douglas Adams? If you were born in the last fifty years and are a fan of British comedy, I’ll assume you’ve come across The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Maybe you’ve even read about his detective Dir...