I just told nightchik -- they've faded so in my memory that it's almost as if I've never read them. Perhaps someday I'll return, but for now my heart belongs to Terry Pratchett as my British humorist of choice.
I have, but it's been a while. The last Adams I read, last year, didn't do much for me either, but it wasn't from the core Hitchhiker trilogy. Basically I found Adams lacking in the compassion for the absurdities of the human condition that for me underlies the most powerful humor.
Not that this would have anything to do with your enjoyment, but Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was actually an adaptation of a Dr. Who script Adams wrote when he was head script writer on the show, that was only partially filmed before a BBC crew strike caused the production to be shut down (it's a 4th Doctor, 2nd Romana episode.) The Professor was actually an old Time Lord who had been living as an Oxford don for over a century, and nobody noticed that he never seemed to change, or was rude enough to point it out had they noticed. I think the book suffers from the feeling that it's recycled, because it *is* recycled--when I read it, I didn't know it was originally a Dr. Who story and yet I kept getting the feeling that something was going on that the book wasn't making clear to me.
There were also some concepts from a Douglas Adams Doctor Who story that actually did get broadcast, City of Death. (The concept of the alien spacecraft's destruction initiating life on Earth)
Dirk Gently isn't really Adams's best work; unless you've read Hitchhiker's and decided you don't like it, I don't think you should give up on Adams quite yet.
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