The Mobile Library Series

If you liked "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and the character of Arthur Dent in particular, you should read The Mobile Library Series by Ian Sansom. The Mobile Library's main character, Israel Armstrong, BA (Hons), is similar in his hapless attempts to control his less than desirable job as a mobile librarian northern Ireland, and entirely likable, if a bit of a sad sack. I like him really, because I relate to his unrealistic expectations of life, which are mostly heavily influenced by the books he's read. I think we could be friends.

In the first book of the series, "The Case of the Missing Books," Israel arrives in Ireland, expecting to be made head librarian of the local library, only to find it has been closed and all the books supposedly transferred to a large mobile library van. Only all the books are not on the van, or the old library building, but missing. As the new head librarian, it is up to Israel to find the books. Here's a bit from the second chapter.

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Israel Joseph Armstrong, BA, (Hons), had arrived in Northern Ireland on the overnight ferry from Stranraer. In his rich imagination, Israel's crossing to Ireland was a kind of pilgrimage, an act of necessity and homage, similar to the crossings made by generations of his own family who had made the reverse journey from Ireland to England, and from Russian and Poland, from famines and pogroms and persecution to the New World, or at least to Bethnal and then Golders Green and eventually further out to the Home Counties, and to Essex, and similar also to the fateful trip made by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood on board the Champlain....

He'd read far too many books, that was Israel's trouble. Books had spoilt him; they had curdled his brain, like cream left out on a summer's afternoon. He'd been a bookish child, right from the off, the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realizing or noticing, who enjoyed books without his parents' insistence, who raced through non-fiction at an early age, who read Jack Kerouac before he was in his teens, and who by the age of sixteen had covered most of the great French and Russian authors and who as a result had matured into an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive soul, full of dreams and ideas, a wide-ranging vocabulary and just about no earthly good to anyone at all.

His expectations were sky-high and his grasp of reality was minimal.

[The ferry crossing was making him ill]; this was not how his new life and new career in Ireland were supposed to begin. His new life in Ireland was supposed to be overflowing with blarney and craic. He was supposed to be excited and ready, trembling on the verge of a great adventure. But instead, Israel was trembling on the verge of being sick again, and the journey had given him a terrible, terrible headache.