Currently Reading: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

After finishing VALIS and The Wordy Shipmates, I have decided to commit to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Huck Finn is yet another in a long list of books I'm playing twenty years of catchup with. I was supposed to read it in high school (and college) but didn't. Time to make like Dr. Sam Beckett and put right what once went wrong.

Maybe I need to write up a list for the blog of everything that qualifies for my little project here.

Just finished (for the first time) in the last few years
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming*
1984 by George Orwell
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?*
The Man in the High Castle*

On the shelf, waiting to be read
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
The Sea Wolf by Jack London
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon

*Was never actually assigned to me in high school or college, but it did sit on my shelf for 20+ years.

I would include the following as well, but I had a lousy college professor whose style of teaching ruined these for me:

The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsen

I think the only books (or plays) I was assigned to read in high school that I actually read were Oedipus Rex, Animal Farm and Julius Caesar. Those all have something in common. Hint: they aren't exactly epics.

Yeah, I'm a fraud.

But I'm doing my best to make up for it.

Quote of the Week

Two good ones this week! I couldn't pick between them:

"What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."

And:

"I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence - a series of words - which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky, you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works."

-Philip K. Dick, VALIS

The Empire never ended

I finished VALIS on Wednesday: this book is a masterwork of religion, history and philosophy. I'm not sure I can completely understand it, short of a PhD in those disciplines. Philip K. Dick was either completely brilliant, or thoroughly mad. Possibly both.

I don't think this is for PKD beginners, but once you've read even just a few of his books, it is nothing to be afraid of. (I used to think his novels were impenetrable. They're not. It's just a matter of getting used to his style.) Also, I'm not particularly religious, but PKD's take on how all religions are unified was a fascinating journey to watch unfold.

Interestingly, while the book was featured at least a couple times on the tv show Lost, I think it bears at least a passing resemblance to some of the themes in that other great mid-00's sci fi tv show, Battlestar Galactica; especially Chapter 7. In Chapter 7, the protagonist Horselover Fat discovers that early christians knew how to reconstitute themselves after death, and that it had been going on since before humans came to Earth. It's not a complete 1:1 ratio, but the themes of death, resurrection, and monotheism central to the cylon characters is all there, and it may enhance my understanding of that show as a result.

Also, I'm basically where I want to be on The Stand. After being behind for most of November, it seems like I could be finished with what I want to read in December by the end of the weekend.
Good stuff. Now to finish The Wordy Shipmates...

A Brief Interruption

I'm thinking about taking the weekend off from reading VALIS. Since it is also the Thanksgiving weekend, I think it would be appropriate to instead read Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates instead.

Sarah Vowell is an author, actress and all-around renaissance woman. I have also read her books Assasination Vacation and The Partly Cloudy Patriot. She's funny, erudite and easy to read. And considering the fact that The Wordy Shipmates is about the early days of Puritanism in the new world, it may be a perfect fit for the holiday weekend.

I'm also taking Thursday and Friday off from the blog, but will return on Saturday, when I will resume our regularly scheduled programming!

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

Currently Reading

Currently Reading: VALIS by Philip K. Dick. I read the first chapter tonight. It really got my attention.

I've read a lot of Dick this year. Besides VALIS, I have read The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik. He is officially one of my favorite writers of science fiction, maybe of any genre of fiction.