Book log: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
Our main cast of space voyaging heroes, Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect,
Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian Astra, gets split up, reunited and
split up again through time travel, teleportation and an increasingly
chaotic series of improbable coincidences. It's hard to tell where
the story is leading, if it's leading anywhere at all, or if it's all
a play on the futility of humanity's deep fixation on The Meaning of
Life. There's still a ton of joy and fun to be had in the book's
unpredictability and anarchy, though. The humor still lands well, the
writing pulls you along through all its distractions and madness,
and Douglas Adams makes some brilliant observations on humanity,
politics and society that resonate well with a 2025 reader. I first
read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe at age 15, but I
couldn't remember a single beat from the story here, unlike the
first book in the series. Which makes for an even more amusing
re-read.
