Well, I finally got to the part about the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Ever totally miss some really mainstream thing, like, I dunno, The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; never saw those; and it’s middle school and you’re terribly terribly concerned about fitting in; and all your middle-school classmates are gushing about these movies, and how awesome they are, but the more they gush about them and their awesomeness, the less you want to see them? And… you end up with this feeling like all these mainstream things, they’re not really for you, even though it’s not like you’ve really experienced all of them on their own terms. All that gushing kind of backfires.

That’s kind of how I felt about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Within certain circles, it’s terribly mainstream, and every time I heard someone talk about it or quote it I wanted to read it less.

So I finally got to the bit about life, the universe and everything and the significance of the number 42, and I was all like, oh, bother, here it comes.

And yeah, perhaps just because I knew it was coming, that part just kind of failed to grab me.

And then — so that’s the Answer to the whole life, the universe and everything stuff — and then they talk about the Question. And that… that was lovely. Touching, in that beautiful way that well-written absurdist comedies can blindside you with something that’s just perfectly blunt and honest and real. That, I didn’t see coming. And it’s one of those things where, once you’ve read it, you start to say hey, every previous scene in this story kind of had to be there for this to work, and it’s just beautiful and satisfying and exactly what I like in storytelling.

Now, I’m not suddenly going to start finding jokes about the Answer extraordinarily funny; I’m just not a big fan of random pop culture references. The point is, it’s pointless. Nothing to see here; there are, it seems, themes in this book far more worthy of my time.

I really, really hope they don’t ever reveal the new Question; I hope it’s not just a set-up for a bigger joke. Because right now, this here comedy is serious stuff.

Looks like there’s a plot kicking in, though still in a jaunty, episodic sort of way. Arthur and Ford have met up with Zaphod, and they’re exploring a strange, enigmatic planet which I assume will harbor the climax of the story.

They’ve hinted at Zaphod having some sort of screwed up backstory, and I’m hoping they’ll explore that more. The characters have been perfectly likeable so far, but I’m not getting a sense of a traditional arc for any of them. Stuff is happening, our characters are reacting… but they seem unchanged mostly.

So Arthur and Zaphod met before, and that coincidence is critical to our understanding of the Heart of Gold‘s power system. That’s kind of a fascinating twist, and if this were another book… I’d be looking out for some sort of stunningly elegant and beautiful and perfect revelation about how these amazing coincidences are going to all add up and say something really cool about why these people are here, why the Universe needed this absurd chain of events to happen and how these people all needed to meet each other, so each one of them could be more complete… but I rather suspect this is not that book.

Still, the bits about the whale and the pot of flowers were priceless. 🙂 I love the opportunities you get, with this whole Infinite Improbability Drive thing, for random, completely absurd humor.

* * *

I still can’t tell you what the Heart of Gold looks like, except to say that I generally think of the bright white & glassy look of the Enterprise in the latest Star Trek movie, which I think was the last spaceship-based movie I saw. I suspect that if I’d recently seen a movie set on a spaceship with dull metallic sets, I’d think the Heart of Gold was dull and metallic.

But I’m coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter; what makes this ship interesting, and what makes it feel real, is not its looks, but how it behaves. And like the comedy I was talking about earlier, it’s all more conceptual than visual. The bizarre engine that powers it; the way the door chimes make its crew feel; the absurdly pleasant computer voice.

I read this Star Trek book once called Spock’s World as a kid, and what I remember most about it was how it made the Enterprise feel real. Like, I had a sense of how it would feel to be on it; to live and work on it; and none of this feeling was necessarily about being able to visualize the sets from the various TV shows and movies.

I already had a clear idea what every Enterprise set looked like, but none of that gave me the sensation of being there like reading pages of text about it. And it honestly hadn’t occurred to me until just now that maybe that wasn’t because the book was the best written thing ever or because it was paced slowly enough to let this stuff sink in or because it was based on a property I was familiar with… maybe it succeeded in feeling real to me because it was a book.

So when an avid reader gushes about how this or that imagined world felt real to them, maybe I’ve been interpreting those sorts of statements all wrong. Maybe it’s just more about the feeling than the visualization, and it would seem that books excel at creating those sorts of feelings.

Okay, that’s probably old hat to most of you. But… I’m excited about this revelation. What we’re talking about here is the written word’s ability to bypass actual stimuli.

The way I saw it, reading fiction worked like this:

1. Book describes visual, aural, or tactile properties of stimulus (ship interior, character appearance, etc.)
2. Reader constructs vivid image of stimulus in head, using written description.
3. Reader reacts to constructed image.

But it’s not really like that, is it? Is it more like this:

1. Book describes various characters’ reactions to stimulus.
2. Reader, seeing the world through the characters, reacts to stimulus in a similar way as the characters.

Hence, the stimulus, in and of itself, need not be described or understood in extraordinary detail. I know the door chimes on the Heart of Gold are annoyingly happy sounding because Marvin the perpetually depressed robot finds them annoyingly happy. I still can’t tell you what those chimes actually sound like. It’s not that important.

If you asked me to draw a picture of the bridge of the Heart of Gold, I’d treat it like any other design project, trying to choose visual elements that created in the viewer the sort of reactions I had when reading the book… and while I’d find that an interesting challenge, it’s not my job as a reader to do this. The book is already getting the reactions it wants out of me… I just need to let it keep doing that.

Got a few more chapters done in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

As always, spoilers ahead.

* * *

So… Vogon poetry.

I’m pretty sure that’s my favorite scene so far. I love the absurdity of it all.

As I suspected, the story is concentrating on Ford and Arthur, having left behind the construction people back on Earth. I like that; it’s a limited number of characters to have to keep track of. I hope it stays this way.

So Ford and Arthur have stowed away on a Vogon ship, endured Vogon poetry, been flushed out an airlock, got rescued by the Heart of Gold,  and are about to meet its captain. And I’m wondering now, how will the meeting with the captain go? Will they get along? Will we learn why Zaphod Beebebrox stole the Heart of Gold?

There’s a great sense of momentum to all this, perhaps because of the book’s radio-play roots; it seems every chapter ends with a great hook that makes you impatient to read the next one.

And, I must admit, I’m impatient to get back on the elliptical and read some more.

Despite that, I don’t get a sense of an over-arching plot that the characters want resolved, and I keep wondering if or when that’s going to happen. Because, while I like episodic fiction, I’d like to see some sort of solid through-line here, something a little more meaty than the action that’s been going on so far. Maybe I’m just not far enough in yet.

* * *

I’m not sure how to organize this really; lots of reading progress here. Have a list.

• Normal pacing. Thankfully, the book did stop being so phrenetic once they were done blowing up the Earth. Yay!
• Reading comedy. I’ve read hardly any books that would quality as comedy; this may in fact be my first. I get the impression that book-comedy is kind of a different thing than movie-comedy; book-comedy (in this book at least) seems to be about the stupid things we think and the silly things that motivate us; it’s all very internal. And this stuff would be hard to express on film I guess.
• Talking heads. I frequently get lost during long stretches of dialogue, having forgotten who was speaking. I have found that it helps to assign each character in a scene a location, like I’m looking at one of those video games where you’ve got a couple of mostly static, hand-drawn characters that slide in on either side of the screen and yammer at  each other. So while I’m reading the dialogue, I’m thinking about the position of this character on this imaginary screen… which helps me more than trying to remember their appearance. It’s like… listening to something in stereo. Which takes me to:
• Visual details. I tend to stress out about my perceived inability to imagine what a fictional scene looks like, whether I’m reading science fiction or playing a pen & paper rpg… and while this may legitimately be a problem, it was suggested by a friend that it’s not as big an impediment as I think it is, and the more I read of this book, the more I am inclined to agree. What matters more, at least at the moment, seems to be thinking about relationships and an overall sense of mood. So like I mentioned above, thinking about the abstract physical placement of characters helps my reading comprehension more than trying to imagine specific details about them or their environment. Similarly, I didn’t even try to imagine what the Heart of Gold looked like — I just think about the emotions its design elicits in others, and that makes it feel relatively real.
• Digestion. Betweeen chapters — and, sometimes, when there just happens to be a double line break between paragraphs within a chapter — I’ll stop and review what I’ve read, what new characters I’ve met, what happened in the plot, what I’ve learned about the universe. While I’m reading a story for fun, this is still all about information transfer, and it takes time to digest this stuff. Reviewing it every now and then helps.

I’ve started reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time. While on an elliptical, trying to get into something like shape and improve my reading skills at the same time.

Since I suspect the vast majority of people who stumble upon my journal have read said novel, I thought it might be interesting to share my thoughts as I go, as well as babble about reading. This will probably be the first of several posts on the subject.

I’m going to separate this out into about-the-book babbling and about-reading babbling.

(In case you haven’t read the book, there will be spoilers ahead.)

* * *

I got through the introduction and first chapter.

I love how breezy the introduction is, and while I don’t read much at all, I’m a big sucker for long-winded introductions printed in italicized text. Also, I love how it says, in a humorous, roundabout, natural sort of way, what kind of story you’re in for, i.e. not a big epic with big epic people.

On to chapter one… I like the setup for everything, though I don’t have a sense of where it’s going exactly (and that’s ok; I just want to be informed in advance of the tone). I really don’t know if this is going to be some sort of Red Dwarf-ish romp through a post-Earth universe, or if that’s an empty threat. But I like that it starts with the threat of the protagonist’s house getting demolished; that lets you look at the big implied threat in terms of something relatable and personal.

I find the three characters that have been introduced interesting and easy to understand, in this television pilot sort of way where everyone’s being drawn in broad, efficient strokes during what’s supposed to be a typical episode. Again, I don’t really know what to expect here; I’m sort of assuming we’re going to be following Arthur and Ford and leave the construction foreman guy behind later on, though I don’t know why I think that. Maybe just because his name, which I can’t remember, didn’t sound familiar.

So off to a good start here. My biggest worry was that I’d find everything annoyingly cheeky, but that certainly hasn’t happened yet.

* * *

As for the actual reading — I chuckled a few times during the introduction. This is a wonderful thing. It means I was relaxed enough with the reading of the book to enjoy it for what it is rather than struggling with the medium. Growing up, the idea that a book could be funny — or exciting, or emotional, or anything but homework — was a bit foreign to me.

Usually, my biggest problem with reading is context. I’ll forget what’s happening or who’s talking or where we are; you might as well feed me sentences in a random order. I told Marie once that all books to me were about people in plain clothes babbling at each other in plain white rooms with plain white furniture.

So I made a point of trying to hold my context here. During staff meetings at work, I’ll frequently try to hold specific words in my head so I don’t lose track of what’s going on. Like a mantra. Admin design admin design admindesign admindesignadmdesad…

…like any mantra, it kind of loses its meaning upon repetition. This approach does not work well.

So I tried imagining what a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie might look like. And that didn’t work either. Imagine trying to read a book while watching a movie version of it… they’ll undoubtedly get out of sync. I’ll have this movie in my head of Arthur going through this morning routine, and the movie skips ahead to an expected part of someone’s morning routine that hasn’t happened in the book, and it doesn’t happen at all, and it’s jarring.

Finally, I tried thinking of static images, and just added details as I read.

Arthur. Arthur in a bathroom. Arthur in a bathroom with a bulldozer outside.

Clear image. Skip to:

Big yellow bulldozer. Arthur lying in front of big yellow bulldozer. Arthur lying in front of big yellow bulldozer with construction guy standing over him.

This worked well. Each time a new element was added to an image, the image didn’t move;  it just became more complex. And I was able to keep those images in my head, and it wasn’t distracting, because it was static and completely nonverbal. Like… a watermark on a web page or nice stationery, just sitting there behind the text, coloring your perception of the text without being at all intrusive.

I have high hopes for this approach, though I don’t know what’s going to happen when the plot kicks in… I’m terrible with those.