“What are Douglas Adams’s Best Books?” We looked at all of Adams’s authored bibliography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!

We took all of the books written by Douglas Adams and looked at their Goodreads, Amazon, and LibraryThing scores, ranking them against one another to see which books came out on top. The books are ranked in our list below based on which titles have the highest overall score between all 3 review sites in comparison with all of the other books by the same author. The process isn’t super scientific and in reality, most books aren’t “better” than other books as much as they are just different. That being said, we do enjoy seeing where our favorites landed, and if you aren’t familiar with the author at all, the rankings can help you see what books might be best to start with.

The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

The Top Book’s Of Douglas Adams

19 ) Health Monitoring Of Structural Materials and Components

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 20
• Amazon: 19
• LibraryThing: 19

18 ) Children, Divorce, and The Church

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 19
• Amazon: 19
• LibraryThing: 19

The motive in writing this book is the hope of sharing a perspective of divorce that is all too often overlooked or ignored. It is difficult to realize that divorce leaves victims other than the ex-spouse. The children of divorce are also victims. They are victims of change where they had no choices; victims where the important players in their lives are torn from the careful scripting of the American idea of family. –from the Introduction Both a parish minister and a child of divorced parents, Adams contributes a pastoral care book to help ministers understand the necessity and benefits of counseling the child or adolescent of a divorcing family.

17 ) The Prostitute In the Family Tree

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 18
• Amazon: 18
• LibraryThing: 17

16 ) The Salmon Of Doubt

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 16
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 14

On Friday, May 11, 2001, the world mourned the untimely passing of Douglas Adams, beloved creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, dead of a heart attack at age forty-nine. Thankfully, in addition to a magnificent literary legacy—which includes seven novels and three co-authored works of nonfiction—Douglas left us something more. The book you are about to enjoy was rescued from his four computers, culled from an archive of chapters from his long-awaited novel-in-progress, as well as his short stories, speeches, articles, interviews, and letters. In a way that none of his previous books could, The Salmon of Doubt provides the full, dazzling, laugh-out-loud experience of a journey through the galaxy as perceived by Douglas Adams.

15 ) Mostly Harmless

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 13
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 15

Douglas Adams is back with the amazing, logic-defying, but-why-stop-now fifth novel in the Hitchhiker Trilogy. Here is the epic story of Random, who sets out on a transgalactic quest to find the planet of her ancestors.

14 ) The Deeper Meaning Of Liff

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 15
• Amazon: 12
• LibraryThing: 16

13 ) Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 17
• Amazon: 5
• LibraryThing: 18

12 ) The Meaning Of Liff

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 14
• Amazon: 12
• LibraryThing: 13

11 ) So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 10
• Amazon: 12
• LibraryThing: 10

Just when Arthur Dent’s sense of reality is at its most clouded, he suddenly finds the girl of his dreams. He finds her in the last place in the Universe in which he would expect to find anything at all, but which 3,976,000,000 people will find oddly familiar. They go in search of God’s Final Message to His Creation and, in a dramatic break with tradition, actually find it.

10 ) The Long Dark Tea-Time Of the Soul

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 11
• Amazon: 7
• LibraryThing: 12

When a passenger check-in desk at London’s Heathrow Airport disappears in a ball of orange flame, the explosion is deemed an act of God. But which god, wonders holistic detective Dirk Gently? What god would be hanging around Heathrow trying to catch the 3:37 to Oslo? And what has this to do with Dirk’s latest–and late– client, found only this morning with his head revolving atop the hit record “Hot Potato”? Amid the hostile attentions of a stray eagle and the trauma of a very dirty refrigerator, super-sleuth Dirk Gently will once again solve the mysteries of the universe…

8 ) Life, the Universe and Everything

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 8
• Amazon: 12
• LibraryThing: 9

The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky above their heads–so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals stand between the killer robots of Krikkit and their goal of total annihilation. They are Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered space and time traveler who tries to learn how to fly by throwing himself at the ground and missing; Ford Prefect, his best friend, who decides to go insane to see if he likes it; Slartibartfast, the indomitable vice president of the Campaign for Real Time, who travels in a ship powered by irrational behavior; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed ex-president of the galazy; and Trillian, the sexy space cadet who is torn between a persistent Thunder God and a very depressed Beeblebrox. How will it all end? Will it end? Only this stalwart crew knows as they try to avert “universal” Armageddon and save life as we know it–and don’t know it!

8 ) Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 12
• Amazon: 7
• LibraryThing: 10

7 ) The Restaurant At the End Of the Universe

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 6
• Amazon: 6
• LibraryThing: 7

Facing annihilation at the hands of the warlike Vogons? Time for a cup of tea! Join the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his uncommon comrades in arms in their desperate search for a place to eat, as they hurtle across space powered by pure improbability.

6 ) Hitchhikers’s Guide To the Galaxy

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 6
• Amazon: 7
• LibraryThing: 4

5 ) Doctor Who

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 5
• Amazon: 3
• LibraryThing: 8

4 ) The Illustrated Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 4
• Amazon: 7
• LibraryThing: 4

Join Douglas Adams’s hapless hero Arthur Dent as he travels the galaxy with his intrepid pal Ford Prefect, getting into horrible messes and generally wreaking hilarious havoc. Dent is grabbed from Earth moments before a cosmic construction team obliterates the planet to build a freeway. You’ll never read funnier science fiction; Adams is a master of intelligent satire, barbed wit, and comedic dialogue.

3 ) Last Chance To See

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 3
• Amazon: 3
• LibraryThing: 3

Very funny and moving…The glimpses of rare fauna seem to have enlarged [Adams’] thinking, enlivened his world; and so might the animals do for us all, if we were to help them live. THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD Join bestselling author Douglas Adams and zooligist Mark Carwardine as they take off around the world in search of exotic, endangered creatures. Hilarious and poignant–as only Douglas Adams can be

2 ) The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 2
• Amazon: 2
• LibraryThing: 1

It’s safe to say that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of the funniest science fiction novels ever written. Adams spoofs many core science fiction tropes: space travel, aliens, interstellar war–stripping away all sense of wonder and repainting them as commonplace, even silly. This omnibus edition begins with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which Arthur Dent is introduced to the galaxy at large when he is rescued by an alien friend seconds before Earth’s destruction. Then in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur and his new friends travel to the end of time and discover the true reason for Earth’s existence. In Life, the Universe, and Everything, the gang goes on a mission to save the entire universe. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish recounts how Arthur finds true love and “God’s Final Message to His Creation.” Finally, Mostly Harmless is the story of Arthur’s continuing search for home, in which he instead encounters his estranged daughter, who is on her own quest.

1 ) The Universe Of Douglas Adams

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 1
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 2

Douglas Adams’s Best Books

Douglas Adams Review Website Bibliography Rankings