Tag: Book review

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams is such a hilarious travel story. At the very first beginning, I had no idea what the story was talking about but bite-sized pieces of story revealed quickly through chapters went crazy eventually. It hooks!

It all began with the central protagonist in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – The British Arthur Dent, a normal Earthman who tried to prevent the demolition of his house, but then a sudden event (you would be surprised but it truly hilarious reading on) that his long-time friend (a kind alien disguised) made him a fateful hitchhiker to the galaxy (actually, it was like fare dodging first) in a ‘Vogon’ ship.

Later, when the guy was put in pretty danger close, they fortunately were saved, and meeting with big boss “the president of the universe” (another ironic character but he’s intelligent to be silly, then you know) in the journey to a mythic planet which does a business of the luxury industry in the once wealthy galaxy (you would be crazy if you know the galaxy has its own economy and depression also, oh wow!).

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: Chapter Summary

From my point of view, the chapter summary for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is kinda useless, as some chapters are pretty short. They just merely like commercial breaks, popping in to define the funny facts or to introduce the characters that would be presented in the next chapters.

Such a whirlwind for reading at the first time, yes I do suggest reading the second time for ones who have bad memories like me, arghh!) You would happen to read several chapters whose page count is only …TWO. (The shortest chapters I’ve ever read, for the book size is only the same as my little palm and it takes seconds to finish).

Age rating for the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy book: Who Should Read

This book is a comedy: there’s no blood but laughter, chapter by chapter. So if you are twenty-somethings, the book reveals how the alien travelers hitchhike (and what difference between hitchhiking on Earth and on a universal scale). The older travelers would find this is such a funny book to digest for laughter too, but, say, let’s put the sophisticated definition of the universe aside. Don’t be too logical as everything is simply improbable to understand.

And if you are traveling with kids (like camping with family), this book should be told to entertain your children well. I suggest you can add some mouth-made sound for universal ambiance that elevates the realistic sense of the book (little boys and girls like it).

Beside this original book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series includes The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe; Life, The Universe And Everything; So Long And Thanks For All The Fish; and Mostly Harmless. So if you like the book, the other siblings may be great to look for too.

Other adaptations: Great movie to watch at home during lockdown

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie (2005) directed by Garth Jennings (and starring Zooey Deschanel – my favorite actress after her role in 500 Days Of Summer), along with TV Series, is also such a travel-themed movie with a taste of science fiction comedy to watch for entertainment during the lockdown at home.

Spoiler alert: the movie adaptation is “same same but different” too, so you may find it familiar with the original story in the book but at the same time, new edition in movie language, especially the ending.

So is the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy good still? Yes, sure! Reading the book and watching the movie offer different experiences. I suggest you enjoy both, because both are funny cosmic rides equally.

Not only the film adaptation, there are also The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Game to play. So surprised at how far inspirational and phenomenal the book is. There are several choices like those from Starwave Mobile – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Adventure Game, following the story of Dent, and the other game, Vogon Planet Destructor, is a top-down shooter where you play the pilot of an alien ship en route to Earth to do something terrible to all mankind.

Conclusion

This book is original, hilarious and good one to entertain after all. It disturbs the brain with a hell of short piece of scattering information first but when you gradually grasp the flow, it is fantastic (and funnier than the iconic Brave New World).

Other Books to Read to Inspire

• Guns, Germs And Steel: the thick book get us travel through time in the long period of 13,000 years before as well as explore the reason why only some regions and nations on Earth enjoy such ideal conditions to grow to powerful kingdoms, conquering the world in the Medieval Age and securing a good position in the Modern Time while the other stand no chance.
• When Breath Becomes Air: The book inspires you with a single big question: “What makes life worth living in the face of death?” That lead was indeed a striking question to me too, in my search for true happiness in the lifetime. That make it count and worthy to read!

I still remember a quote in the popular book “When Breath Becomes Air“.

“What makes life worth living in the face of death?”

That lead was indeed a striking question to me, in my search for true happiness in the lifetime.

Death is not a new subject to inspire people to live. When I was in university, the speech that Steve Jobs had delivered at Stanford University inspired me probably every single day, with 3 simple points of view: connecting dots, love and loss, and death. “If today was my last day, would I do what I’m doing” – the constantly obsessive question pushed me to follow my deep inner voices, personally instinctive consideration and arbitrary curiosity from time to time. To be honest, that guideline has not brought me to fancy wealth or a successful public figure in terms of social status yet, but mostly, happiness on a daily basis.

My choices were now and then controversial among my friends and family, who saw none of my intent to build a sustainable long-term career as well as serious asset accumulation. Instead, I heavily invested on my own lifestyle and so many sequent trial-and-error following my curiosity. I had wished to fly in 2018, and I finally did it in 2020 as a paragliding pilot, not passenger (it cost a big fortune from my financial savings though). For now, sometimes I still have doubts about my enthusiasm for paragliding. But I am glad that I did it. At least, I knew whether I would love it certainly, instead of questioning myself the rest of my life. Thankfully, death pushes me to lead a positively hectic life with those pivotal decisions.

Death in “When breath becomes air” is observed in another angle, which is not totally of mere motivation. Moreover, the work possesses unprecedented storytelling perspectives. Paul Kalanithi wrote “a book about death” based on his own journey as a talented neurosurgeon, whose goal was to seek meaning of living through a wide array of observing deaths and moments at the edge of mortality in operation room of the clinic, until he accidentally changed his role from subject (a surgeon) to object (a patient) in the light of one of the popular diseases that changes millions of people’s livelihood. It’s cancer!

The following are thoughtful lessons I learned from this worldwide bestseller.

Death is unequal

The author was at the mountaintop of his career and life: best job offers and a promising decent life along. It should have a real pay off for his relentless efforts from medical student to professor of neurosurgery. Indeed, it was ALMOST complete: ten years of training, as well as thousands of hours in residency, earning the respect of seniors, winning prestigious national awards, all at age thirty-six. Then all fell apart when the cancer in his body started to deteriorate.

So death doesn’t bother either your achievement, wealth or status. The life expectancy of our society might even be generous, but we individually may be shorter, due to some unexpected events, and at an unexpected time. When I was in my early twenty-something, many of my friends and acquaintances to whom death rang the bell for various reasons, from chronic diseases to sudden accidents. And each time I heard the bad news, it reminded me again that my time was limited in the universe and I should live relentlessly for my goals and values I trust, because we all don’t know “if tomorrow never comes”.

The first place you wish to come eventually is home

Every family has its own affair. Sometimes children argue with their parents and vice versa, not to mention the “infinity war” among siblings. But surprisingly, at the end of the lifetime, most people wish only to pay a visit to close friends and be surrounded by intimate family members before taking a boat to the afterlife. So death reminds us not only of our most important things, but also the most important people in our life. Take care of them, as one day you may desperately need them around.

Curiosity is your best guide

Paul knew he would never be a doctor, but a writer (he read countless books when he was teenager and Brave new world was also a work changing his philosophy about happiness, and became the subject of his college submissions essay). However, a sequence of events gradually pushed him from pens to scalpels fatefully.

The meaning of life was frequently at the top of his curiosity, his first attempt to find the answer himself was to attend Stanford University and graduated with degrees in English literature (spiritual meaning) and human biology (physical meaning). Then, he moved on to Darwin College (University of Cambridge) and graduated with the Master of Arts in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. But the deeper he got into these majors, the more he knew that literature wasn’t the answer. Then he refused to pursue a Ph.D. in English Literature to attend Yale School of Medicine and returned to Stanford to complete his residency training in neurosurgery, which almost satisfied his curiosity afterall.

The journey of Paul teaches me that if we have not found our real passion, love or dream jobs yet, just follow our curiosity with persistence and rewards will finally come!

In intuition we trust

Despite whatever useful knowledge we learn, they are not enough to help us make decisions sometimes, particularly in emergency cases or pivotal consideration in career. Some of our choices may be based on what is often known as “Judgment call“. The phrase impressed me most, that on the verge of death, instinct is all we can lean on. Physicians make judgment calls every day, and the fact is actually mentioned in the book of Paul Kalanithi. So “believe in yourself” is not merely a cliché, but a hint indeed. When you have no idea which path to follow, let’s sincerely ask the inner “you”, as the answer may open a door to an interesting journey.

My Favorite Quotes from “When Breath Become Air”

“It’s very easy to be number one: find the guy who is number one, and score one point higher than he does.”

“A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.”

“It was becoming clear that learning to be a doctor in practice was going to be a very different education from being a medical student in the classroom”

“Judgment call”

“Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws[…].Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.”

“The question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life worth living”

“[Greek concept arete] Virtue required moral, emotional, mental, and physical excellence”

“Technical excellence was not enough.[…]When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.”

“[About the standard statistic Kaplan-Meier curve that measures the number of surviving over time] It is important to be accurate, but you must always leave some room for hope”

“The days are long, but the years are short”

“Have the plan A, B and C at all times”

“[…]such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when.”

“I struggled, while facing my own death, to rebuild my old life – or perhaps find a new one.”

“Flush in the face of mortality, many decisions became compressed, urgent and unreceding”

“Human relationality formed the bedrock of meaning”

“Hemingway described his process in similar terms: Acquiring rich experience, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.”

“I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living”

“Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.”

“You have to figure out what’s most important to you”

“Goodness is a thing, and you can never live up to it”

“To live life to its fullest’, to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions”

“Life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just reflection”

This is my very first English book for New Year Resolutions. It’s a big work of sci-fi and honestly it’s tough to read, too. Here is what I learned from Brave New World, mostly about happiness (and the reason why backpacking is still a joyful lifestyle for some of us, me included!)

(Spoiler alert: I would partly reveal the plot below, so if you’d like to read, then read it, before continuing)

Interesting distintives

The iconic novel by Aldous Huxley introduces a world where human beings are perfectly conditioned, well-planned, fully content, even infantile a bit, hence, full of … happiness. On top of that, the people are cloned in clusters and born in bottles, predestined by “World Controllers” with a few certain “caste” roles to play. Due to the poverty of combination, there are a large number of twins, alike. It is such a scary imagination that everybody looks identical, indistinguishable and lacks distinctive signatures. In fact, people now seek similar perfection. We change the appearance to reach for the common beauty, as a result, we lose our own identity! So, the next time, when you look in the mirror, regardless of your being old or ugly in terms of the social norms, just be happy, at least we are not the same, and we all contribute to the diversity of humanity. That’s a big deal!

Discontent to content

In “Brave New World” universe, it seems people are cloned (not born, definitely) with the silver spoon in their mouth, despite the different castes or designated social classes. Following the “Rules for happiness” as German philosopher Immanual Kant once said “something to do, someone to love, something to hope for”, most of people depicted in the novel are “happy” – They are assigned certain jobs requiring skills that they’re trained throughout “teenager” via hypnopaedic therapies. For love, the discriminated sex is a commonsense, so “everyone belongs to everyone else” which means you can love anyone and vice versa. How easy it is! Hope is the least important deed as all needs are almost met. But is that perfectly organized reality too boring for some of us, who would love to think differently, act differently to reach our end differently? A few unpredictable events turns out to save our life from boredom too. So actually, our “real” life now is perfect basically

Predestined to be wilderness-oriented

The Savage (who was brought up in a primitive tribe) refuses to absorb the civilization after being brought back. Instead, he eventually flies to a countryside neighborhood to live among the wilderness and enjoy his ultimate freedom, like some of us. Admittedly, there are moments when the full living in comforts becomes weirdly boring, and we wish to camp among evergreen forests and endless running streams, birds singing and flowers blooming. An irresistible beauty, simply undeniable nature!

You’re weird, but not the only one, thankfully!

The protagonist always feels his strange differences from the others. When he shares his thought to a fellow, It turns out that he is not alone! I used to be like him when I was younger, especially as a teenager, when we often wonder “who we are and why must be me”. Getting older and I never question myself about my differences. I embrace them all, then happiness comes, naturally!

Embrace unexpectancy or get mad

At the end of the story, one of the protagonists gets mad as he’s surprisingly acknowledged that he is exiled to an island due to his condemned actions. It is like a termination to his life before he “resets”, to say sorry and embrace the fact.

Basically, life stays between orders and chaos, as well as events as planned and unexpected, that we could not change. So getting mad or keeping calm to come up with solutions is our choice. Life on road is divergent from time to time, then be prepared to steer hard to get it back on track and get rewards!

A hike through 13,000 years of human civilization evolution and five continents in less than 600 pages.

This book was actually a big deal to me, since it focuses mainly on the history and geography, in contrast to the first English book of the new year challenge – Brave New World, which heavily depicted a fictional universe in the far future. Truth be told. Some sessions of this work really discouraged me as it presented such an enormous number of examples in boring scientific approaches, coupled with a long line of ancient flora & fauna names that I had to frequently look up in the search engine to get the picture. It’s like you were following a jungle trail and the feeling was extremely overwhelming, but when you got acquainted with the flow, everything turned into a big interest.

That is how the reader is gradually seduced by the thick book of Jared Diamond – an American geographer, historian, ornithologist, and author best known for the popular science books. After finishing the book, I have to admit that the long summary at first pages really bored me, but looking back, I see how logically the content structure was arranged, in a well-thought order with surprisingly good coherence.

So, to the main point, how will the book get us travel through time in the long period of 13,000 years before as well as explore the reason why only some regions and nations on Earth enjoy such ideal conditions to grow to powerful kingdoms, conquering the world in the Medieval Age and securing a good position in the Modern Time while the other stand no chance?

Everything starts with a big question (and you would run into a great deal of questions throughout the book as the author raises himself and explains logically himself). Unlike most of the pop science books which tell history like stories, Jared’s work uses various scientific approaches to reveal the history, and successfully to persuade readers that the long long history of humanity had to happen that way, nothing else. That’s his smart answer to the aforementioned question!

Beside these scientific aspects, the book hooks me through a dozen of field experiences of the author himself in some of the off-the-beaten-track countries like Papua New Guinea, which is just less than 100 miles away to the north of well-known Australia. The country now sports a wide array of eco-diversity and tribal cultures, but also at the edge of the most dangerous destinations for foreigners (type yourself a query about traveling to Papua New Guinea and you would come across a couple of the travel safety concerns right at the first pages of the search engine). So the deep field knowledge of this less-travelled country will be worth your time. In addition to Papua New Guinea, the book also enriches readers with the history of Down Under in terms of geography and anthropology. If you have ever (or wished to) travelled to far-flung islands of the continent like Fiji or Samoa, the stories add interesting cultural facts beside the mere paradise landscape like most travelers covered. Australia and New Zealand are also mentioned in the book and I believe you will find them more interesting after digesting this work of Jared Diamond.

I always love to travel to every country in the world, and every chapter is like a one-way ticket to a certain continent or country and visit national museums. Take America for example, the book revealed the story of the fall of Inca and Aztec empires by European pioneers, which set fire to my travel bug to explore the legacy of these once powerful kingdoms of the continent.

The book also dedicates a chapter for the impact of germs (or the most catastrophic diseases in human history) to the order of the world. Some stories are quite merely funny, but they explain the origin of the popular diseases, the evolution of microbes throughout history and their remarkable effects on the feats of the conquers. During the pandemic covid, this chapter did hook me from the first pages to the last ones.

Other main points of the book to reveal the fate of different continents and nations include the choice of food production methods – hunting-gathering or sedentary lifestyle of the tribes due to the geographic condition and indigenous culture. The axes of the continents also contribute surprisingly to the wealth and the development of those lands. Some attractive countries to the globetrotters like China, Japan or those of the Black Continent also share their stories in separate chapters, especially the answer to the controversial origin and the paradox of development that would astonish keen readers to the last chapters.