I've been re-reading _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ by Douglas Adams, and he seems even more prescient now than he did when I first read the books 20 years ago. More on that some other time. Anyway, in the copy I was reading from, _The Restaurant at the End of the Universe_ has a preface by Terry Jones (of Monty Python), who in passing says:

> Nobody, I suspect, reads the Hitchhiker books for their plot. Not many, I would suppose, read them for their characters (apart from Marvin). So why is it that we love these books so much? After all, if a novel doesn't have great characters or a compelling plot, why bother reading it?

And the next book has a preface by Simon Brett (the producer of the very first radio pilot) who (coincidentally?) says something very similar:

> _Life, the Universe and Everything_is the book in which Douglas gets closest to actually having a plot. But as he would readily admit, he wasn't really good at plots, and it isn't a very good plot. That couldn't matter less, though. You don't read Douglas Adams for his plots any more than you read Raymond Chandler for his. You read both authors for their language and the imaginative world that they create.

I've been returning to this thought quite a few times for some reason, and I'm still not sure what I think. Maybe I need a list of some other authors that one reads not for their plots or their characters.