The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy review

Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is Alice in Wonderland in space. I initially felt the form was getting in the way of function, with a lot of storylines on their own, but halfway through the book they did get together and so got my interest in it.

A lot happens and it becomes a fun tale of imagination. The writing is sharp and actually, the greatness of this book comes from the absurdity of the situation and the dead-pan mundane every-day-language used in it:
“We tried to revive our cleaning staff but we discovered they’d been dead for nearly thirty thousand years. Who’s going to clear away the bodies, that’s what I want to know.”

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Twenty-three years

Twenty-three years

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Searching for meadows

Searching for meadows

Our new home in the Netherlands sits in a mundane residential area full of young families like ours. The street name comes from made (‘meadow’), still referring to a field that once lay here and now survives only in the name (just how the name Shanghai refers to a river that no longer exists). And […]
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Degrees of wealth

Degrees of wealth

In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China? Neither question is […]
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Goodbye to Guanyin

Goodbye to Guanyin

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June 30, 2026