Authors Who Shouldn't Be Dead, but Are: Douglas Adams

Photo of Douglas Adams's grave in Highgate Cemetery, London, by Neha Viswanathan, from Nehavish's Flickr site *

Listing Favorite Books on my blogger profile flummoxes me. The first and most obvious problem is Big Picture Paralysis. Say that I've read something like 100 books per year, since I was ten. That's 3,700 books. Faced with the blank blogger box, I can't think of one.

Once I do think of something, there's the paralyzing awareness that one's choices display an inventory of one's psyche. I second-guess all sorts of neuroses my choices might give away.

Then, I'm afraid of creating a misleading list. I don't want to name authors who don't really represent me, even though I'm not at all worried about what loving them says about me.
Douglas Adams, for instance.

Adams is most famous for his five-part trilogy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and that's not the writing I like him for. (Though I did like the 2005 movie version pretty well, especially the brilliant Bill Nighy as Slarti-"I'd rather be happy than right"-bartfast, the guy whose job it is to create the "fiddly bits" around the coastlines of planets.)

I only love Adams's book Last Chance to See, written with scientist Mark Carwardine. It follows the journey of the two men around the world as they visit animals on the brink of extinction. Species like the kakapo, New Zealand's flightless parrot, the world's fattest parrot, of which 86 remain on Earth. [Photo, right, from NZ's Kakapo Recovery Programme.] Adams blends quirky amusement with heartbroken dismay like nobody else.
I love Last Chance so much, it would make my top-100 list.

As I write this, I realize I should put the book but not the author on my list. Easy. I don't know why I didn't already think of this before--I did that very thing with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Though it's one of my favorite books, I haven't cared much for anything else by the author, Jeannette Winterson, so I didn't name her.

Getting around to the title of this post, finally, I mean to say that there's a group of authors who shouldn't have died when they did. Naturally we want all our favorite authors to be alive and writing. I don't mean that. I mean, there are some author-deaths that surely were Cosmic Mistakes. I've already mentioned Algeria's Tahar Djaout, Zimbabwe's Yvonne Vera, and Texas's Molly Ivins.
Further, if authors of this "authors who shouldn't be dead, but are" group hadn't died, they'd still be alive, not like Charlotte Bronte, whose death was also a Cosmic Mistake but would be dead by now anyway.
I really want these contemporaries of mine to be alive, because I need their help. I want to know what they'd say about All This Mess.

But these lovelies did die, so we just have to hold on to our towels and take Douglas Adams's advice, applicable in all situations, anytime, anywhere:
Don't panic!
And say to ourselves, as Adams wrote he wanted to say to the kakapo, "everything is going to be alright," even though he knew it probably wouldn't be.

P.S. Did you know May 25 is International Towel Day? Flag (left) from Towel Day 2006, on the German blog Kopftuch Fur Den Herrn. (Explanation in post below, "About the Towel.")
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* Neha also blogs on Within / Without about:
"Arbitrary Obsessions. Cities. History. Music. Feminism. Maami-isms. Patterns. Halwa. Identities. Free Verse." She also blogs for Global Voices.