Fifth time. Spreadsheet says fifth.

Fifth. The spreadsheet has 2003, 2008, 2014, 2020 and now, which means I have picked this up roughly every six years without ever once deciding to.

The copy is a Pan paperback with a cracked spine and my name inside in handwriting I no longer recognise as mine. There's a bus ticket in it, Cardiff to Newport. I have no memory of that journey at all.

What has changed, specifically. I used to think the Vogons were the joke, and now I think the Vogon poetry is the joke and the Vogons themselves are simply accurate. They aren't funny. They're a planning department. They do the paperwork properly and then they demolish your house and they are, technically, in the right. I work in local government procurement and I promise you I am not reading that in.

Second thing. I'd misremembered the whale. I had it as a page, maybe a page and a half, and it's much shorter than that, and much better for being shorter. In my head I had expanded it into something with a moral. There is no moral. It's a whale being delighted about a ground rushing up to meet it, and then a bowl of petunias.

Third thing, and it's the one that bothers me. Marvin used to be my favourite and now I skim him. Not all of him. But the routine is the same routine every time he appears and I caught myself running my eye ahead to find where he stops. There's a note in the margin at his first entrance, dated 2008, reading: "the best character in any book, ever." I would like a word with the man who wrote that.

What has held completely is the tone. Not the gags. The gags are load-bearing but they aren't why it lasts. It's that Adams never gets excited. Something enormous happens and the prose carries on at exactly the same pace with its hands in its pockets. That's very hard to sustain and he sustains it across four and a bit books.

Also the Babel fish argument, which I once filed as the cheeky bit and now think is the finest comic paragraph in English. It's a proof. Laid out properly, with a QED at the end. You can follow every step of it. It is just wrong.

Ten, obviously. It has been a ten since 2003 and I would have to be a very different man for it not to be. My daughter is fourteen and I gave her a copy at Christmas and she said it was "fine," and I have decided to let that go for another year or two.

Admin note for anyone keeping their own list: I have started logging which edition. I read the 2002 omnibus in 2014 and the typesetting on that thing is dreadful, and I reckon it cost the book about half a point that year.