Of course this one is a re-read, but it was so very long ago that I'd forgotten large pieces of this very small book.
What a fun book!
It certainly is timely to reread the book since the movie remake is coming out in the next little while. It's not the kind of book that you really want to spend a lot of time talking about afterwards. It seems to me that the delight of the book lies in the individual experience of reading it and "getting" the jokes, allusions, parallelisms, and just plain outrageousness of it. This is an excellent "what if?" kind of book in that it gets you thinking about the most improbable things. But what is interesting about that process is the way they are presented. It gets you thinking that there's no reason why the universe doesn't act in such a wacky way, and that in turn gets you questioning why it is that the universe acts the way that it indeed does (including asking why humans act the way they do - always a good thing to question).
But even this bit of philosophical musing is too heavy for this book. If White Teeth is like eating vegetables - good for you but hard to enjoy (not my words, I loved it!), then The Hitchhiker's Guide is like a favorite comfort food that you pull out when you're feeling low.