Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Collection Book

The first two are fantastic in the literal and colloquial senses. The remainder are only weak in comparison to what went before. So many wonderful concepts and phrases:

Vogon ships "hung in the sky in exactly the way bricks don't"; the Hooloovoo; the old man who said nothing was true but was later found to be lying; spend a year dead for tax reasons; meat bred to want to be eaten; the "knack" of learning to fly is to "throw yourself at the ground and miss" (I think Buzz Lightyear borrowed that); "Aggressively uninterested"; Slartibartfast; "One of the least benightedly unintelligent organic lifeforms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not be able to avoid meeting" (I think Boris adapted that one); "it makes as much sense as the sea being parallel"; the future is "just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air"; "the sun was quite bright but the day was hazy and vague".

Hitchhiker's Place in My Life

(This section was added after an epiphany, which prompted me to make my reviews more personal.)

These have a strong hold on my heart, having enjoyed them in different forms at different stages in my life.

My first encounters were in my final years of boarding school: I heard much of the original BBC radio series and loved them. I read the books as soon as they came out, saw the TV series (mostly the same cast as the radio) and saw a stage version that was the funniest and most anarchic thing I'd ever seen in a theatre. They remained deeply ingrained in my mind, closely entwined with fond memories of school; I reread them occasionally. Then a film version came out; it wasn't as good, but opened the door of the books to my son, so I enjoyed them in a new way, followed, a few years later, by a new stage version, by which time my son was a young adult, and enjoying it at a new level.

The Answer is 42
Of course, 6 x 9 is NOT 42... except in base 13.
But Adams claims not to have known that.

Reviews of Books in the series
Brief summary and favourite quotes from each of the five books, as follows:

Hitchhiker's Guide (vol 1):

Restaurant at the End of Universe (vol 2):

Life, the Universe and Everything (vol 3):


So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish (vol 4):

Mostly Harmless (vol 5):

And Another Thing...(Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #6), by Eoin Colfer :