I'm pretty sure they have pizza delivery in London by now

[bloodygranuaile]

For the BSpec book club--which, incidentally, is meeting on the same day as the politics book club, immediately after it in the same location--we elected to read Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, the second book in the Dirk Gently series, which is not nearly as famous as the Hitchhiker's Guide series.

 

For some reason I found myself a little slow to warm up to this one; it's not that the book starts slow in terms of action--in fact, it starts off very rapidly in terms of action--it's just that it took me a while to get at all invested in any of the characters, or begin to figure out what was going on enough to care about it, which left me with just the jokes, which are mostly pretty solid but often just a little bit more long-winded than I quite felt they needed to be. There are times when long, rambly bits of humor can be just as funny as the author wants them to be, but it tends to work best when used sparingly, and nothing makes a joke come off just a bit amateurish as being not quite as tight as it could be.

 

That said, by the time the story began to take something like shape, I did end up ripping through it quite quickly. The story itself is still pretty much just a series of completely bananas events, although they do all (or at least, mostly) tie back to a single Faustian plotline involving the ongoing decline of the Norse pantheon. I do like a good story where divinity runs on human belief. That said, it wasn't very deep, and I don't feel like I got much out of it except a few amusing hours. Which, to be fair, is probably exactly what I needed, given that winter in New England tends every year to be the long dark tea-time of my own soul.

 

I think it'll be interesting to see how the book club discussion goes, given that there's likely a large number of amusing jokes to revisit but little serious literary analysis to be done. I like Adams a lot as a writer but he's just not Sir Terry Pratchett.