{"id":305,"date":"2005-03-12T11:17:00","date_gmt":"2005-03-12T16:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=305"},"modified":"2005-03-12T11:17:00","modified_gmt":"2005-03-12T16:17:00","slug":"adams_douglas_d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2005\/03\/adams_douglas_d\/","title":{"rendered":"Adams, Douglas: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (audio)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> <\/a> <\/p>\n

I’d read Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency<\/cite> and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul<\/cite><\/strong> before, but remembered nothing useful about them. I listened to them as audiobooks read by the author, as with the Hitchhiker’s books<\/a>, and Adams again did an excellent job (with one small exception).<\/p>\n

Dirk Gently’s<\/cite> was a lot better than I’d remembered (the sum total of which was Coleridge and weirdness). The ending requires a fairly unjustified deductive leap, but the characters were much more emotionally engaging—I remember listening to the death and after-death of one of the characters, and thinking that Adams had really surpassed himself with the sequence. Except for that unjustified deductive leap, the book also struck me as a lot more carefully constructed than the Hitchhiker’s Guide books. It does something neat with the worldbuilding, which is carried through well and cleverly even though I was distracted and didn’t notice it at first. I think that as a novel, it’s probably Adams’ best.<\/p>\n

Despite the title of Dirk Gently’s<\/cite>, I thought Dirk was a supporting character and was unsure he could carry an entire novel by himself. Fortunately, in Long Dark Teatime<\/cite>, he’s balanced with a sensible co-protagonist, Kate (who doesn’t sound American in the least in Adams’s reading). The characters and book were ultimately less engaging to me, however, because it’s much pettier<\/em> than the first. This is the point, mind you (consider the title), but it’s still not to my taste. It also struck me as less tightly-constructed, though I’m afraid that with this backlog I can’t recall the specific loose ends.<\/p>\n

I certainly recommend reading or listening to Dirk Gently’s<\/cite>, though, and I’m pleased to have rediscovered it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d read Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul before, but remembered nothing useful about them. I listened to them as audiobooks read by the author, as with the Hitchhiker’s books, and Adams again did an excellent job (with one small exception). Dirk Gently’s was a lot … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Adams, Douglas: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (audio)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,118],"tags":[125],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sf-and-fantasy","category-single-narrator-audio","tag-adams-douglas"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}