Well, I’m 20% through my second Thing — rereading Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. I finished the first book today. It’s as funny and witty as I remembered. I’ve read the first two books of the series more than the rest, so I’ll count this as more of a Thing once I’ve gotten to the fourth book.

Here’s some of my favorite lines from this one.

“‘This must be Thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. “I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”

“Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.”

For thousands more years, the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across — which happened to be the Earth — where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.

“It’s just life,” they say.

Just a couple of weeks in, and I’d say my 42 Things by 42 project is off to a great start. I’m also working on updating my Librarything list and figuring out what I’ll need to read or get rid of. Up next, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.