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Douglas Adams – Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency | Review

Title: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Author: Douglas Adams

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 248

Rating: 4*/5

Douglas Adams – Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

I’ve been looking forward to reading this for a while now, but I’ve been holding it back so that I’d have it to look forward to. I’ve not been enjoying reading as much of late and so I thought it was about time for me to pick this one up. I made a good call.

I’ve read Adams’ Hitchhiker’s books before and I’ve also seen the adaptation of Dirk Gently starring Elijah Wood on Netflix, but I also knew that the original book had a different plot to the series and so I had that to look forward to. I also feel like I’ve somehow gone full circle by reading the Hitchhiker’s books before listening to the radio show and then reading Dirk Gently after watching the adaptation. It makes a sort of “original book” sandwich.

The humour here was excellent and it’s what the book is really all about, but the plot itself and also the characterisation are spot on, if not exceptional. I also enjoyed reading the way that Adams wrote about technology, bearing in mind that this book was published before I was born. He future-proofed it pretty well. It had a joke about Excel that still works just as well today, which I think is a sign of how seriously savvy he was. This is definitely one worth reading.

Douglas Adams

Click here to buy Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

P. G. Wodehouse – Thank You, Jeeves | Review

Title: Thank You, Jeeves

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 286

Rating: 3*/5

P. G. Wodehouse – Thank You, Jeeves

I was expecting so much more from this book. After all, this is the first book in Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series, and it’s this series that established his reputation as something of a comic genius. The problem is that his humour isn’t particularly funny, and in this book it’s effectively downright racist. Much of the comedy surrounds what happens when the characters decide to “black up” to disguise themselves as “nigger minstrels” and are unable to find the butter they need to remove it.

So as you can imagine, the book hasn’t aged particularly well, and quite a lot of the situations that the characters find themselves in are no longer relevant to our lives today. Still, that’s to be expected to a certain extent with any classic, and you can’t really fault Wodehouse for it. That doesn’t make it any easier to swallow it when you’re not enjoying it, though.

It’s a shame, really, because I liked the way that Wodehouse strings sentences together. I just didn’t find the subject matter to be particularly interesting, and it also wasn’t that amusing. It reminded me of one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, except if you cut out the dramatic confrontation with the arch-nemesis and instead extend a card game or a round of golf to 200 pages. Like a rubbish sandwich, it was 80% filler with very little substance.

Go ahead and try the Jeeves and Wooster books if you’d like, but I wasn’t impressed. The good news is that Wodehouse wrote dozens of books with different characters. That doesn’t help much here, though.