Book 105: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

To be truthful to you, my most loyal readers, I haven't fully digested this book yet. Douglas Adams has this wonderful writing style were everything seems carefree and funny but is really questioning everything we know. It's absolutely brilliant but it always takes me a while to think about what I've just read.

I'm going to inturpt this review with some spoilers so I can properly discuss this.









starting








now

****SPOILERS****

I didn't really like the whole finding the man who runs the universe bit. I found it ultimately disappointing. However, Arthur and Ford's journey back to prehistoric earth is another story altogether. I found that the aliens that settled earth said a lot about our consumerism culture. Similar to the way The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a wonderful commentary on bureaucracy, and this one started out on the same path, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, continuing on Douglas Adams trend to dissect the way we live in his writing, has written a wonderful commentary on what it is to be a consumerism culture with too many people researching what everyone likes best, and what colour suits what product best to actually think. 

Take, for instance, the hyper intelligent beings on the planet who were forced to have very loud conversations to stop them from thinking because it made the other less intelligent planets around them to feel stupid, the fact that they built a restaurant at the end of the universe, and the fact that flying spaceships into suns during concerts was deemed normal. This use of things in excess and submission of our intelligence is proven only to injure our society, as much as that space ship may have made the planet a more delightful place to live.

****SPOILERS****

I give this book 9.5 leaves out of 10. It seems to be a popular rating today. I'd like to say that everyone should read this book, but in my heart I know this is not true. There are people who, unfortunately, think that Mr. Adams isn't funny and that his books are terrible. This is mostly due to the fact that they spend too much of their time talking and if you read this book you would know what I meant by that. The point is that these books are very very smart and if you don't get what they're talking about you wont enjoy them nearly as much as you should. I would suggest you tried but you probably wouldn't like it (har har Marvin). Needless to say, I've enjoyed it quite a lot and I would hope that you would too.