I've been a huge fan of Douglas Adams since I read the Hitchhiker's series in High School. My personal recommendation is to grab the audiobook version that's r

I've been a huge fan of Douglas Adams since I read the Hitchhiker's series in High School. My personal recommendation is to grab the audiobook version that's read by the Douglas himself. As an American, there's a little bit lost between British/American English and some of the humor is missed (sometimes changes are even made -- in the American version of the book that I have "Biscuit" is replaced with "Cookie"). I'm an audiobook junkie (speed reading has killed reading fiction for me) and I usually stay away from books narrated by the author because the quality of the narration suffers. Such was not the case with Adams' narrations -- they're excellent and I picked up on several things that I missed from my original (several) readings. I was very sad when he passed -- a heart attack while working out that was probably complicated by his legendary drinking. It was almost sadder when the latest book came out as evidence that nobody could pull off that series but Adams. The books and the author are endlessly quotable (and recognized by nearly every programmer I've ever worked with), but my favorite of his -- from the Dirk Gently series -- is "Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all." I use it every time a project is proposed that someone thinks is "nuts" or "impossible" and it sits on the background of my Visual Studio code editor as a reminder. :)