I’m sorry, bookworms. I know I’ve been a bad book blogger this week. In my defense, this week is quickly shaping up to be one of those weeks where I can’t seem to do anything right. I’ve had the urge – several times – to crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head, and wait for it all to be over.
Since I can’t do that, I’ll just try my best to find some balance and write a real blog post for you. While I’m doing that, I present an excerpt from one of my favorite books, in which the narrator waxes poetic on……a book!
From the preface to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“[This] is…the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or heard of by any Earthman.
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
In fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor – of which no Earthman had ever heard either.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one – more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don’t Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”
[Photo Credit: Kuhnaydeein's Flickr Stream]
