I don’t normally do book reviews, but a) ZZ9 Â can pinch this for the next issue of MH and b) Mr Gill kindly messages me via Twitter and I kind of mentioned I’d write one.
42 Douglas Adams’ Amazingly Accurate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything by Peter Gill
This could easily just have been a book full of random news snippets and dodgy maths, but Gill manages to make it a little more than that. Chapters throughout attempt to group the 42’s together by theme and there’s a fair bit at the end filled with Adams’ own reasons for choosing the famous number.
Being the 42 geek I am I was impressed with the number of references I wasn’t previously aware of. What I wasn’t so keen on was that quite a few were rather tenuous. There are a couple of “just over 42″s and the like which break the rules! Gill also introduces a couple of sections based on pushing the number 42 into a given situation, the main example is his idea for an alternative decibel system based on units of 42.
The idea of 42-ana (I just made that up) is that you look for the presence of 42 in other things – not shoehorn it into places where it doesn’t already exist. That’s just an excuse to list something else which has nowt to do with the subject at hand.
Despite this complaint, I quite enjoyed the book. Even when this tactic is used the subject matter is usually interesting enough to be worth reading regardless, but I am a lover of all things trivial. It’s not a book for everyone, not even for every Douglas Adams fan, but it’s good bedside or bogside fodder.
I hope that doesn’t come across as an insult to the author!
