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My personal impression is that a reader steeped in soul-crushing dysfunction in his or her daily life will enjoy The Guide with gusto not achievable by those whose lives resemble nirvana.

My childhood was anything but nirvana. I'll spare you the sob story about growing up in 1990s Russia because it's unoriginal and water under the bridge. It's also irrelevant to this thread because I read The Guide as an adult while working for a very "difficult" startup that took every dysfunction prize imaginable and then invented some of its own. The Guide pretty much saved me from insanity, and for that I'm thankful.

He posted (on his own usenet fan group) the following:

"The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an
ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations,
base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk,
stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story."

But of course nobody is an entirely reliable narrator, and certainly not the author of The Guide so... Maybe?

(Edit: I see a peer respondent already linked it, but I'll leave this anyway)

Getting More - Stuart Diamond. I still think this is the best book on the art of negotiation.

Getting Things Done - David Allen. If you have adult ADHD like me, and you haven't read this, it's the first system that's really worked for productivity for me.

Man's Search for Meaning - Victor Frankl.

Living Buddha, Living Christ - Thich Nhat Hanh.

Cosmos - Carl Sagan.

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin.

The One who Walks Away from Omelas - U.K. LeGuin.

Wild Seed - Octavia Butler.

The Heike Monogatari - (tr. Helen Craig McCullough) “The sound of the Gion Shoja temple bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that to flourish is to fall. The proud do not endure, like a passing dream on a night in spring; the mighty fall at last, to be no more than dust before the wind.” If you need a comparison. this is the Japanese historical equivalent of Game of Thrones combined with a bit of MacBeth. The rise and fall of two shogunate families, and an analysis of the tragic flaws of character that brought their fall about.

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo.

Small Gods - Terry Pratchett.

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad.

The Guide - R. K. Narayan.

Evidence - Mary Oliver.

All of Us - The Collected Poetry of Raymond Carver.

Silence - Shusaku Endo.

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Murakami Haruki. This and the next four are odd choices, perhaps, since it's a surrealist book, but IMO books that force your imagination to work hard do as much for creativity and fresh ideas as any of the more popular methods.

The Well-Built City (The Physiognomy / Memoranda / The Beyond) Jeffery Ford - Surrealist novellas best described as about the protagonist living and achieving agency within the constructs, dreams, and nightmares of a "Great Man's" mind.

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson.

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon.

Dhalgren - Samuel L. "Chip" Delany.

Yeah, I can see where you're coming from. I might be critical as well, if I hadn't read it until adult and could compare it to other kind of humour. (Say, Monty Python.)

Thing is, the Guide (the local translation of the radio play and then the book) was about my 4th or 5th science fiction thing ever (after some Star Wars and Star Trek I had seen in TV, and some occasional book, probably Heinlein), and for a ~12 year old, it was a formative experience. Not a single Monty Python or Dr Who contact prior to that.