Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

I was expecting a lot more than I got. Adams' humor, extolled throughout the Internet, just did not do it for me.

The problem is probably that I was too late to be in on the joke. Pop references to this book gave away all the funny parts to me. The evolutionary worldview was too much for me to laugh at. The blase treatment of God was not my cup of tea.

It was creative; I'll cede that. Adams insists the Earth was built in hopes that someone there would discover the question that prompts the answer to the meaning of life. That, of course, is 42, as a supercomputer revealed to the aliens ruling the universe. But just when a girl actually comes up with the answer, the Earth is bulldozed by the galactic highway construction crew, who builds a space road where the planet used to be.

That the answer to the meaning of life question could be a quantified amount, and that it requires a question to uncloak its ramifications, is inhererntly absurd, and therefore funny. But altogether, I could not get into the story and accept its premises. It just was not for me.