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Ubik by Philip K Dick

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Takeaway: Is anyone better at writing paranoid fiction than Philip K Dick?

Philip K Dick was brilliant and deeply troubled.  Which seems to make for a good science fiction writer.  Ubik, a 1969 novel, is set in 1992, when psychic powers are common.  Joe Chip works for a “˜prudence organization’.  Prudence organizations specialize in helping people or businesses protect themselves from psychics.  So they use anti-telepaths to protect people from having their minds read by telepaths or other anti-psychics to counter the variety of different psychic powers.

The other plot point you have to understand is “˜half-life’.  In this future, when people die, if they can be preserved in time, they can live in “˜half-life’, a sort of preserved life of the mind.  You cannot life forever this way, but your body is preserved and you can communicate with people outside your preservation chamber.  But at some point you sort of fade out and are reincarnated.

There is basically no way to discuss this book without spoilers, so if you don’t want any spoilers for this 45 year old book, you should stop reading because I am going to disclose pretty much the whole book.

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Resolving Everyday Conflict by Ken Sande

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Resolving Everyday ConflictSummary: Very practical and biblical look at the way we are to handle the everyday small and large conflicts in our lives.

Every month Christianaudio.com gives away a free audiobook.  Most of the time I do not get around to reading and reviewing the book before the end of the month.  But this month I am on the ball and have finished it before the month is even half over.

This is one of those books that I have already recommended to a number of people.  Everyone deals with conflict on a daily basis.  It may be small or large, but conflict is a part of life.

One of the reviews I saw on Amazon played on the biblical phrase in its title, “Where two or more are gathered there is conflict.”

Ken Sande starts with a simple definition of conflict, “Conflict comes because we see something we think we deserve and cannot have it.”

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Dawn by Octavia Butler (Exenogenesis Trilogy #1)

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Summary: A Woman wakes up to discover the Earth as she knows it is no longer, and the only hope of survival is an alien species that has questionable motives.

Dawn is the first book that I have finished reading from KindleUnlimited’s library.  I actually already owned the kindle edition, but the audiobook is included in KindleUnlimited so I moved it to the top of my list.

Octavia Butler is known for her strong African American female leads, unusual in the science fiction world. Butler’s first real hit, Kindred, was semi-fantasy. A time travel book that takes a 1970s African American woman back to her 1820s era slave owning ancestor.  Kindred is an excellent book, one that I highly recommend and the best of Butler’s books that I have read so far.

The other of Butler’s books that I have read is Butler’s last book that she wrote before she died, Fledgling, a vampire book that was written about the time of the Twilight vampire craze.

So Dawn, as an Alien abduction novel, is yet again completely different.  Butler does a great job building suspense, letting you know what the main character is feeling and making the aliens, alien. It is one of the common thoughts of science fiction writers that if we do find aliens, that they will be so alien that we will have a hard time relating to them or even understanding why we don’t understand them.

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The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic by James KA Smith

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1404896221_0.pngSummary: Maybe our need for interpretation and our finiteness as humans is a feature of our creation, not a consequence of the fall.

The more I read James KA Smith, the more I appreciate his perspective.

The Fall of Interpretation was Smith’s first book.  It was an adaptation of his Ph.D. dissertation that he lightly edited and re-released in 2012.  Last fall, it was briefly on sale, and I picked it up because it was written by Smith, without really knowing what it was about.

Like normal for Smith, this is a book that has way more philosophy than I understand.  But also, like normal, I can follow the argument without always understanding some of the minor details.

Smith’s argument is “To be human is to interpret, to encounter the world and entities within the world” and “something of an encounter conditioned by the situationally of human finitude”.  He is suggesting that our finitude is not something to be overcome, but something to be embraced as a feature of our creation.  (Yes, the language can be a bit overly academic, but it is understandable.)

The problem is that,

“At root (and roots, of course, are usually buried, unseen and hidden) the linking of interpretation to fallenness may be understood as the product of a dominant Western interpretive tradition, a broadly neoplatonic understanding of creation and Fall, an understanding that is itself an interpretation. I believe that this tradition, which has significantly influenced aspects of the Christian tradition, remains plagued by an incipient Neoplatonism (or gnosticism) that continues to construe creational finitude and human be-ing as “essentially” fallen and therefore ties hermeneutics to such a corrupted condition.”

What was important about this book for me was his discussion of the finiteness of humanity.

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MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker

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Summary: Basis of the movie and beloved TV show, and well mined by them both for ideas.

Every night my senior year of college MASH was on at 10 PM and was watched by whoever happened to be around.  Long before that I had seen most of the episodes, but it is a testament to its quality that college kids were devoted fans to a show that started the year before most of us were born.

Last week the novel was the Audible deal of the day so I picked it up.  And mostly I enjoyed it.

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The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

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Summary: A farce in the style of PG Wodehouse (or vice versa) poking fun at the triviality of Victorian society.

I know that Wilde has the reputation of being funny, but the only other work of his that I have read was the Portrait of Dorian Gray.  And while I appreciated the book, I did not think it was great and it certainly is not a comedy.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy.  It is also a play and it has been a while since I have read a play with stage directions and character dialogue.  And I am not sure I have ever listened to an audiobook of a play, which is what I did here.

Two friends both are leading double lives, in part because they can.  Algernon is meeting with his friend who is known as Earnest.  Earnest wants to propose to Algernon’s cousin, but Algernon discovers that Earnest’s cigarette case has the inscription “From little Cecily, with her fondest love to her dear Uncle Jack.”  So Earnest admits that he is actually named Jack (or John) but uses the name Earnest when he comes to London to get away from his country house.

Algernon admits a similar deception when he wants to get away from London, he pretends to visit a sick friend named Bunbury.

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Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (Read Again)

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I am reposting my review of Neverwhere because it is the Kindle Daily Deal and on sale for $2.99.
Neverwhere by Neil GaimanTakeaway: Is comfortable better?

After I reviewed Neil Gaiman’s latest novel (The Ocean at the End of the Lane), I started having friends ask for recommendations of other Gaiman books.  So I decided I should go back and re-read some of those books that I keep recommending.

My traditional advice with Gaiman is that is you like the adult fairy tales, then you start with Stardust, then read Neverwhere or The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  Then read his creepy kids book Coraline.

But if you like Gaiman’s alternative takes of mythology, then read American Gods, Good Omens and Anansi Boys.

Neverwhere is the story of a man (Richard) that has a comfortable, but plain life in London. When he stumbles on Door (a young woman that is bleeding on the sidewalk in front of him). He is introduced to the world of London Below.  And suddenly his life in London Above is not quite the same.

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Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

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Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming is the second novel in the James Bond series (Casino Royale is the first). James Bond is an English officer in the secret intelligence service, commonly known as MI6. In this novel, Bond is sent to New York City to investigate Mr. Big, an underworld Voodoo leader, who is suspected of selling 17th century gold coins in order to finance Soviet spy operation in the United States. His beautiful and mysterious fortune telling girlfriend runs away with Bond only to find herself in serious danger. Bond’s CIA contact, Felix Leiter, teams up with Bond only to be put into a very precarious situation involving marine wildlife. In the end, Bond is victorious over the evil Mr. Big so that he might die another day.

While I read a James Bond novel entitled Carte Blanche by Jeffrey Deaver, this is the first James Bond story that I have read by Ian Fleming. Because of this, I can’t speak too much on the themes of the novels. I will say that I was expecting quite a bit more and was disappointed. Perhaps it can be said that since this novel was only the second in the series, the character of James Bond was still forming and the themes were only slowly beginning to solidify when it was written. The reason I was disappointed was because the character found in this novel was different from the film version. The smart and racy quips that James Bond is known for are very few and far between in the novel and the smoothness with the ladies is not very apparent either. Supposedly the first novel in the series was a great success so perhaps Fleming felt the pressure to repeat that success to the point where he tried too hard and missed the mark.

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