I threw a few paragraphs into it and got Stephen King. The next few paragraphs I checked out linked me to Steve Palahniuk. Fun fact: I’ve never read more than a chapter or two of either of them. On the list, on the list.
Sadly, I’ve yet to link my name with Phillip K Dick, my current author du jour. I just finished reading Valis, The Mind in the High Castle, and Ubik. I’ve run out of books, but I haven’t gotten bored yet. Another Barnes & Nobles run may be in order…
I found Valis to be similar to The Illuminatus Chronicle. It’s part of that same conspiratorial, pseudo-spiritual half-comedy genre that science fiction likes to dabble with. As a story, it’s an extended, narrated, autiobiographical journal entry from a man suffering an existential and psychological crisis? That’s as close to a one-liner as I can come up with.
The Man in the High Castle is a revisionist history. What if Germany and Japan won? That’s the world premise. The story follows a handful of characters through sort life vignettes as they cope with a world suffering a very different sort of Cold War than our historical one.
Lastly, there’s Ubik. It’s about a group of anti-psychics hired to nullify a group of active psychics at a secret lunar base. My description is poor, but my summary is perhaps better: it”s the scariest book I’ve ever read. There’s no shock horror, not even Lovecraftian weirdness. It’s not a frightening book in that sense. Instead, it’s disorienting, claustrophobic, paranoid. It’s scary in the sense that The Ghost Writer (Polanski’s film) was scary. The whole effect is as mysterious as the book. The words taken individually aren’t confusing, but together the story from the very beginning suffers from a sense of dizziness. Nothing is blantantly wrong, but nothing feels quite right either. It makes for a tremendous read.
That’s the reading for this week. A few exciting prospects on the horizon, but nothing to announce for a few weeks, if ever. The next book on the list is Planet of Adventure by Jack Vance. I read some of his short stories about a year ago and was blown away. Phenomenal stuff, but unfortunately my writing didn’t match his name either. Hmm. Back to work,…
I wonder what responses would be like to the questions: