The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
Edit: by Douglas Adams (yeah, like that addition was needed)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
53 points (98.2% liked)
Ask Lemmy
33999 readers
1738 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I felt personally offended when my teenage son was like yeah it's OK.
So that's why you gave him up for adoption ;)
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
As crazy as what we've discovered with physics and consciousness in the last two years, I legitimately think there may be something to it.
Like, maybe the scientific pursuit of measuring the tiniest possible details has a butterfly effect that makes everything in a level we notice completely fucking insane.
Like how Google maps when you zoom in it replaces all the pixels. Maybe zooming in anywhere causes a snowball effect where everything everywhere suddenly needs to also be determined at that level, and that's why shit at the "human level" isn't running right.
There's so much in those books that sound so stupid in the surface, but honestly aren't as far fet he'd as they initially seem.
Gives me Philip K Dick vibes but with some of the best comedic writing ever instead of meth induced paranoia like Dick.
+1
The Hobbit.
First "real" book I read at like 10 or 11 and I just went straight the the whole series after.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Redwall, by Brian Jacques I think. Basically medieval fantasy drama but with woodland animals if I remember properly. I loved the whole series, great books when I was a kid.
Oh my god I saw the post and immediately thought Redwall! Glad to see you, new friend!
The Eye of the World, the first book in the Wheel of Time series. There were other books I really liked prior to that, but I distinctly remember reading that one on a long road trip I was stuck on with my parents, and being just completely enthralled by it. Made a 14 hour car ride feel like nothing.
The series ultimately led to discovering Brandon Sanderson as an author (when he took over for the last 3 books in the series), which led to a lot more really memorable, beloved reads, so that's a nice added bonus.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Hitchhikers Guide, my mom got me to read it really young. I was maybe 8.
Before that, Zoobooks obviously
Picking just one book is really unfair as I fell in love with various books at different times of my life.
But to answer your question, the very first book I remember falling in love with as a little kid is... two books. Jules Verne 'Michel Strogoff', and Conan Doyle's 'The Lost World' which I read in French back then as 'Le monde perdu'.
But I insist, this is absolutely unfair to the many other books I've loved and still love to this very day :p
load more comments
(2 replies)
Hatchet
Redwall by Brian Jacques. Introduced me to so many things like the fantasy genre, multi-book series, deep worldbuilding, archetypal races and probably way more. The food descriptions also stand out in my memory.
Haven't gone back to see how it stands up but I highly recommend it for kids whose reading level is improving and want to move up a tier in length/difficulty.
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen hit me at the right time as a kid.
The Black Cauldron Series.
There were books? I just remember the animated film.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Something by Brian Jacques when I was ten. Probably Long Patrol or Mossflower. turned me from a book hater into a book fiend. Like, literally pissed off my parents because I would read at night instead of sleeping.
Redwall by Brian Jacques was probably the earliest one I remember loving.
The Magician's Nephew
this was my first introduction to the concept of multiple realities and it blew my little 7 year old mind
That's the Narnia prequel, right? It was by far my favourite book in the series as a kid, though I was already familiar with the concept of multiple realities thanks to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I always hoped it would get an adaptation. I haven't reread any of them as an adult, but my memory of it still makes me hope for that one day.
load more comments
(1 replies)
YESSS. I loved this as a kid and I was so angry it didn't get a movie adaptation. I think a lot about how the ground made everything grow because the world was new. I still think about the "you can't unring the bell" thing.
the concept of the Deplorable Word spell that kills every living thing except the caster was also terrifying and amazing to me. Took a few years to realize it was probably a metaphor for nuclear weapons
I got really stuck into the Artemis Foul books as a teen. I always thought they'd make a great TV series.
It was a lithuanian children's book. As far as I know it's not been translated to other languages, it was called "stebuklingas portfelis" by Vytautas Račickas
load more comments
(2 replies)
Cujo
The first of the Dragonlance books. I loved that trilogy so much as a kid. With Raistlin and Caramon, Tika, and Riverwind, Goldmoon... Thirty years later I still remember it.
When I was very young, 10 or under, there was a book I read that I remember almost nothing about, just that there was a kid who found or built a bunch of robots to do various things. The only robot I really remember is the one made to row a boat, named (appropriately) Row-bot. It had a bell built in that would ring every time it made a stroke. At the end of the book all the robots have to leave the boy, and the last scene is him watching them rowing away and hearing the bell fade into the mist. That I even remember any of the book tells me I really liked it.
Besides that, I was gifted a copy of Ender's Game for my 15th or 16th birthday. I really loved it and it was the first time I can remember being really blown away by a plot twist.
Edit: The first book may be Andy Buckram's Tin Men.
When I was a kid I remember reading a Dragonfall 5 science fiction novel and enjoying it.
A few year's later I read To Kill A Mocking Bird for a school assignment and being impressed by Harper Lee's writing style and finding the story and topics really interesting. Around that time I also fell in love with Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.
The one that really struck me was "Starstreak: Stories from space!" It was a collection of short sci-fi stories including The Haunted Spacesuit and Who Goes There.
Turned me into a lifelong SF reader.
Fox in Socks, Dr Seuss.
The Mysterious Benedict Society was my childhood. I swear I read the whole series like 8 times. Got me into mystery novels and I've loved them ever since.
Star Wars: Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn
Damn it was good. Opened up the world of Star Wars and reading to me.
Since Disnep declared them null and void I refuse to read anything from the new canon.
Probably a Hardy Boys book, I used to devour those as a pre-teen.
I never read a book outside of school (which was all fiction books, which I never got into), and then I was gifted Zygmunt Bauman's Globalization: The Human Consequences and loved it and realized non-fiction is a thing
The first book I really enjoyed and got into after high school (as in it wasn't a required reading) was The Hunger Games.
My earliest remembered favorite is The Little Red Car by Bernice Orawski. Cute little kids book with lovely illustrations about a car having the worst day of its life.
Kingdom of Shadow by R.A. Knaak.
I played lots of Diablo 2 back then and a friend once went into this small nook with books in a local games shop and showed me they have Diablo books. I wasn't much of a reader. I read some books that I enjoyed, but moat of them I was made to read.
I wanted to know more about the world of Diablo so I bought it. I mever expected it to grab me as it did. When I came home, I was like "let me read a chapter and go to actually play after". The boom jumped right into action with the first sentence and the PC was not turned on for 3 days (unheard of until then) as I used every free moment to read the book.
I bought other books in the series right after and then started to branch out to other fantasy series. This is the book that made me a reader. And I can thank a videogame for that.
I think mine would probably have to be the Darren Shan saga, starting with Cirque du Freak. I think I was 10 when I picked up the first book in the series at a random bookstore in Seoul, and I can't have been older than 12 when I finished the last one. I think that ending was the first time I cried at a piece of media.
Where the Red Fern Grows
I was a very sad child and that book gave me lots of excuses to be crying all the time xD
There was one early teen book series that my school library has where it was a town with weird things happening and kids investigate. Twice aliens came to get help from the kids. I can't remember the name of the series though.
Watership Down
view more: next ›