Tea Time

Is it ridiculous to try to make sense of The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, or should I just continue to enjoy being mystified so I have en excuse to read it again?

Whatever blows your hair back!

What's to not understand? I thoroughly enjoyed it.

it is internally consistant, so sense can be made of it. It is helpful to have at least avague familiarity with ancient norse god traditions but google will provide more detail than you need.

I wouldn't try and integrate the concepts into your everyday living though!

Any specific areas that are causing puzzlement?

Readit agin first though perhaps it will all come clear seond? time around?

If you follow the words you'll eventually end up at your destination, heee heeee!!!

Well, perhaps I'll try it again, myself, then. :)

I actually had a harder time with Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. It probably doesn't help that I read Tea Time first though. Either way, it made much more sense to me.

I wish there were more Dirk Gently books; it makes me smile just to think of them. I read them before I read the Hitchhiker series, and for some reason the Gently books make more sense to me than the Hitchhiker books. I find with Adams that it's best just to enjoy them and not to worry about what's happening or how or why.
And, The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul is probably my favorite title of all time.

#7 have you read the salmon of doubt? It contains the notes Douglas Adams was working on at the time of his death for a new gently book - not as good a full finished story, but a worthy addendum.

#8 - Not yet. I didn't know it had Gently material in it - thanks for letting me know. (Yay! Another book I can get!)

It's more than just notes, it's 11 chapters of material culled from three different versions of The Salmon of Doubt retrieved from Adams' beloved Macs. In addition, there is a reproduction of a fax from Adams to his agent explaining what the story would be "about". The rest of the book is made up of various essays, short stores (previously published elsewhere) and interviews with Adams.

If you loved how Dirk always managed to arrive at the solutions to his investigations through his most unorthodox methods and belief in the interconnectedness of all things, I think this book would have been the best yet. The premise: someone is anonymously depositing money into Dirk's bank account each week, therefore, Dirk suspects someone has anonymously hired him to investigate something. But who? He decides to follow a random person to see where it leads.

Reading Salmon really made me realize how much I miss Adams. I've read all of his books 2 or 3 times and will probably read them again during my life. The man truly brought a smile to my face.

I totally agree. It made me so sad to get to the end of that book and know he'd never get to finish it. And it was more than just not getting to read the end, though it sounds silly. I felt really sad that he died before his time. He seems like he would have been an amazing person to know.

Doh! Re-reading my previous post (#10), I think I may have just stumbled on to where Douglas Adams may have been taking The Salmon of Doubt. If you'll recall, he had said in various interviews that while it started out as a Dirk Gently book, he couldn't get that story to go anywhere so he was thinking of changing it to a Hitchhiker's book. But how? Would he scrap everything and start anew? But, as I had stated above, Dirk Gently was following around random people to figure out what he was supposed to investigate and who had hired him. Now, if I recall correctly, Arthur Dent is revealed to have a daughter named...Random. Could it be that she was to have played a part?

From one who has not read the book in question; it sounds highly plausible. Yes, Arthur Dent did have a daughter called Random.

I thought the ginger haired man Dirk was following sounded like Ford Prefect.

(spoiler if you haven't read Mostly Harmless)

Random and all the others died at the end of the last Hitchhiker's book, though. Earth got blown up again while Trillian, Tricia, Ford, and Arthur were on it.

They've escaped from situations just as dire as that one, if not more so. Although in the specific examples I'm bringing to mind it was always Marvin who saved them...and Marvin died in the previous book. I was so sad when I read that. *sigh*