Father Brown meets Zaphod Beeblebrox

A pair of book reports.

1. G. K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown
I first read the Father Brown books years ago, and since then I have read many other Chesterton volumes. I figured it was time to return to Father Brown, and, wow, is he even better than I remember him. The tales are philosophical and theological ruminations posing as detective stories. Chesterton wrote a lot of books in that vein, but Father Brown is his best detective. The books are wonderfully fun to read--if you have never read Chesterton, it is a great place to start.

[G.K. Chesterton makes a rather interesting appearance in Neil Gaiman's Sandman. I have no idea why Chesterton is in that story, but it was rather nice to see him.]

2. Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Now this is one incredibly disappointing book. Adams' Hitchhiker series is amazing, and the Dirk Gently series was good, but this book was ridiculously bad. It was a collection pasted together after Adams died, collecting many of his shorter pieces. Here is the odd thing--almost nothing in this book was worth reading. How could Adams not have accidentally written some interesting short pieces in his lifetime? A few funny bits, but not many. Lots and lots of rather silly attempts to be serious. I did skip the whole "parts of the novel Adams was working on when he died" for a couple of reasons: 1) In other pieces, Adams repeatedly says that the novel he was working on was a disaster and if he thought it was worse than the other things in this book that he published, then it can't be very good, and 2) I am not a big fan of the "Well, the author died and left an unfinished book, so let's publish the fragments" genre. (It worked for Virgil, Thucydides and Kafka, I suppose, but even still...)