I took my own advice for once and spent yesterday reading an uncomfortable book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Del Rey, 1979). Friends have been telling me for years that I just had to read it, I’d love it sooo much. But it never seemed like my brand of vodka, so I put off picking it up for, oh, the last forty-five years or so.
Now that I’ve read, I can confirm I was right. Not something I’d normally want to read or anything I’ll ever go back to reread.
But I was also right about the value of reading uncomfortable books. Because it wasn’t interested in the story or the characters, I paid more attention to the writing and the author’s style—the entire point of a non-familiar-and-comfortable read!
I discovered, for one thing, that my favorite filmmaker’s movies are peppered with quotes from Hitchhiker. In fact, since there’s an entire series of comedy Sci-Fis, I gotta figure he culled even more lines than I’ll ever know, because—sorry Rob, while I do love humor and enjoy some classic science fiction—my next uncomfortable title will hopefully be less akin to The Three Stooges.
Which is not to say I didn’t appreciate the Stooges in my younger years, but madam, I ain’t that young no more and they weren’t never no Marx Brothers.
My other discoverable was being also right about modern prose’ apartment-beige-ness. Loving Twain, Renault, Hamilton, Potok, and Thurber as I do, I get absorbed in their colors and lyricality, their wisdom and warmth. Ergo I always get sucked in to reading their works for pleasure, which effectively obfuscates their techniques and maneuvers.
No such problem with Hitchhiker. The author’s devices leaped out at me, loud and clear, a sigh-inducing reminder of how much more freedom and energy books had of yore, before modern education flattened and conformed and round-holed everyone’s individuality into just the facts, ma’am. Don’t get me started on conservative education’s destruct-voice agenda!
From that perspective, Hitchhiker was a happy read, a jumbled skip-along of pov changes and asides, infinitive splits and “outdated” footnotes, thoughts spilling on top of each other, and the kind of demonstrative punctuation that gives a story energy and a flavor seldom seen from today’s fiction-writing pens… er, keyboards—
… "er” being a great formerly common-usage term I’ve just now decided to reactivate for my own convolutions. So much more charisma than “uh” or my oft-used “hmmm.”
If’n I’d been more involved in the tale itself, I woulda missed all that. So I guess I can say I liked the book after all, despite the story’s belabor-ment. Thus bringing me to my last non-bullet point, to wit: reading a book I’ve spent decades eschewing (for damn good reasons) produced exactly the results I keep telling my students and clients it will. Score another point for the geezer, nu?
AND YET, all that said, I’m still not going to revisit Robert MacNamara’s tome, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (with Brian VanDeMark) put out by Times Books, a div. of Random House in 1995. I bought it that same year and kept it in the stack of books on my nightstand until it began to stink of non-perusal and moved, without conscious effort, to my must-read-soon pile that somehow relocated itself to Bookman’s Used Books store in exchange for a voucher for more used books that I finally threw away around 2020.
Not that I thought I wouldn’t learn anything from reading the bastard’s sorry, not sorry self-justification. Au contraire! I learned on an almost nightly basis that I couldn’t get past page three without falling asleep.
The Beeb television show of the Hitchhiker was great! I didn't realize there was a book.
BTW, that stack of books that you bought, intending to read them, is a tsundoku.
loved this musing!